Act IV, Chapter 17: Elara's Fleet Touches the Shore of Aethoria

The sea gave them up at dawn.

Forty-three ships, their sails the color of old ash and dried blood, emerged from the Mourning Sea's grey curtain as the sun cracked the horizon's rim — not brilliantly, not with the fanfare of omens, but with the exhausted persistence of light that has traveled a very long distance and arrived to find no one waiting to receive it. The tide was coming in. It had not been consulted on the matter of invasion.

Elara Drakon stood at the prow of the *Thessaly's Fire* and watched the coast of Aethoria materialize from morning mist with the particular stillness of someone who has rehearsed this moment so many times in imagination that the reality arrives almost as disappointment — too solid, too particular, too indifferently made of mud and rock and seabirds rather than the burnished abstraction she had been approaching all her life.