The Starfall branch estate felt eerily quiet in the pre-dawn hours, a stark contrast to the chaos that Ethan knew must be consuming the main Drake family compound hundreds of leagues away.
The ancient walls of this lesser branch, built from the same quarried stone as the primary family seat but on a more modest scale, seemed to whisper with the weight of distant crisis.
In the private study that had become their unofficial war room, Ethan sat across from Lysander at a low table carved from blackwood and inlaid with silver.
Maps of the continent spread between them, marked with colored pins indicating family territories, trade routes, and potential conflict zones. The morning light filtering through the latticed windows cast geometric shadows across the documents, as if the very sunlight sought to remind them of the complex patterns that governed their world.
