The chamber held two hundred people.
Aelara had not expected that. She had known it was a full assembly, had known the territorial representatives would all be present, had known the presiding body and the official observers and the formal record keepers would take their places and the room would be full in the way rooms were full for things that did not happen often. She had prepared herself for a large room.
She had not fully prepared herself for the specific quality of two hundred people holding their breath.
She felt it from the moment she walked in. The weight of the attention, the particular focus of a room that understood it was present for something that would be in the record and was behaving accordingly. People in their seats before the hour. No side conversations. The presiding body at the long table at the front, seven of them, the three with no documented allegiance to either party in the center. The formal record keeper at the side with her apparatus already running.
