Act V, Chapter 23: Seravane's Last Architecture — the Speech Before the Fall

She did not move.

That was the first thing Aldric registered — that in the suspended instant after he spoke her title, with the gate sound reverberating through the throne room's stones and the assembled lords shifting in their collective unease, Seravane stood entirely still. Not the stillness of a woman surprised. The stillness of a woman who had been waiting for a specific word in a specific room for a very long time, and was now — finally, irreversibly — hearing it.

Then Lord Fenn's voice broke the surface of the silence from somewhere to Aldric's left, and everything began.