Location:Zhū'kethara — Inner Chambers
Date/Time:Cinderfall, 9942 AZI
Realm:Demon Realm
The beast stopped hiding.
Ren felt it during the morning council. Not a collapse. Not a crisis. A release. The wall that had divided his soul-bond for months dissolved quietly, the way ice dissolves in warm water. One moment the barrier was there — the familiar partition that his beast had built to keep its secret, the boundary that had made Ren feel like a stranger in his own soul. The next moment it was gone. The space behind it was open. And the beast was resting in it with the profound, bone-deep peace of a being that had finished something important.
The sensation flooded through the bond without warning. Peace. Not the absence of struggle — the presence of completion. The specific, unmistakable feeling of a task finished, a burden set down, a purpose fulfilled. Ren had felt the beast's moods for ten thousand years. He had never felt this one.
