The ballroom had been remodeled—again.
Hadeon didn't comment on it, but the message was clear. The floors were Calanthi marble now, temperature-calibrated to match the room's ether signature so the heat from bodies wouldn't linger. The walls bore no portraits, only paneled screens flickering with slow, ambient ether flow, programmed to show light storms from foreign skies. Not real storms, of course. Filtered. Curated. The kind of storm only the powerful could afford to frame.
