POV: Aphrodite
This is the moment before everything breaks.
The prison awakening below us changed something in the throne room's atmosphere the way a pressure system changes before a storm. Not visible, not audible in any clean sense, but present in the way that real things are present — in the body, in the specific awareness of the air having a different quality than it had ten minutes ago.
The King has not moved from his throne.
But his control is different now. The ancient stillness that has been his default since we met, that carefully maintained management of everything he actually is and feels and carries, has developed cracks in it that mirror the crack in the corridor wall from two days ago. I can see them if I know what I'm looking for, and I know what I'm looking for now, the specific places where the management thins and what lives underneath it shows through.
