The Director's office was a fortress of perfectly ordered paranoia.
Director Lyss Myrvalis stood rigid behind her massive stonesteel desk, actively surrounding herself with physical manifestations of her failing control. Every object in the room sat locked into a suffocating geometry. The three brass inkwells on her desk were aligned to the millimeter, and the encrypted field reports stacked into completely flush columns. The heavy iron door behind her was bolted shut by five separate mechanical locks, reinforced by a glowing mesh of Ministry-grade disruption wards to keep the rest of the world out.
It was the office of a woman desperately trying to prove that the world still made sense.
Lyss's silver scales—once the terrifying hallmark of her authority—were deeply mottled with exhausted gray. She hadn't slept a full night in three years, and her tail flicked across the floor in a rapid, involuntary rhythm acting as a metronome of pure anxiety.
