Valentina opened the meeting with a summary that stretched into twenty agonizing minutes of bureaucratic recitation.
Rex sat motionless, the picture of attentive neutrality, listening to every syllable with the practiced patience of a man hearing a story for the first time even though he could have recited the entire timeline from memory with more precision and less dramatic flair than she managed.
She moved through the chronology like a prosecutor building a case against fate itself: first, the string of inexplicable deaths whispered to be the work of a specter known as 'The Undead Bringer'; then, the seismic devastation wrought by the entity Tremor that had reduced the northern district to rubble and corpses; the near apocalyptic dragon incident involving the defector Ignivara; and finally, the atrocity of Theo Von Nightwing.
