Chapter 79 The King Who Waits

• The North had always been cold, but after the war, its silence felt deeper—like the world itself was holding its breath. The mountains that had once howled with battle now lay quiet, their peaks touched with lingering scars of gold from Lucia’s final light.
• Weeks had passed since the mountain’s eruption, yet the echoes of that night still haunted every shadow.
• The royal city of Varyon was slowly being rebuilt. Its great gates, once splintered by Devin’s armies, stood tall again under new timber and iron. Smoke rose from forges as blacksmiths repaired what war had shattered. Children’s laughter had begun to return to the courtyards—faint, hesitant, but alive.