Tohu was laughing when the message arrived. Not the performative laughter of courts and rivals, but a rougher, lower sound, and he was already watching the carefully laid plan unravel along the edges of its own cleverness before the second hand had turned. He lounged in a seated sprawl over a low seat of dark minerals in a wide pavilion that overlooked a shifting valley of living weather. Storm fronts strode below the platform like herds; lightning walked on long and lank legs between them in the gloom. The air smelled of wet stone and charged metal.
Across from him, a broad shouldered being with bronze skin and a crown of broken horns was still mid-sentence when he stopped mid-motion and turned back to Tohu.
"I had the sequence," the bronze one said, voice edged into something near a growl. "The lesser House was placed. The debt line was clean. They had only to hold the corridor for three breaths."
