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Chapter 13: The Diplomatic Foundation
Author: Vermilion
last update2026-09-15 18:19:11

The silence that stretched across the foyer felt less like an absence of sound and more like a physical weight, a pressurized atmosphere held in place by the Inquisitor’s hovering stylus. Vane stood perfectly still, his monocle refracting the dim glow of the foyer’s sconces until his eye appeared as a fractured, multi-faceted mirror. To any other observer, he might have been a man waiting for an answer. To Vaedrik, he was a predator calculating the exact structural fault lines required to disma
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