Selphine had always been drawn to words.
Not just their meanings, but the way they bent with time—how empires split, how dialects drifted, how sounds hardened or softened depending on who carried them across borders. She collected them like some girls collected pressed flowers, folding scraps of old text into her journals, memorizing subtle shifts in vowel or cadence.
The Lorian Empire and the Arcanis Empire might share a tongue now—born of the same mother before history carved them apart—but sameness never lasted. In Lorian speech, s often bent toward sh, vowels stretched longer, syllables dragged like silk. In Arcanis, consonants clipped shorter, cleaner, more practical. What once was one voice had become two dialects wearing the same face.
That was why the name had caught her.
Lucavion.
The moment she'd heard it, something had rubbed wrong. Like a thread snagging at the back of her mind. She'd rolled it over, again and again, but it didn't fit. Not perfectly.
