POV: Caius

The first meeting is held on neutral ground, in a hall that has not hosted this particular combination of banners in living memory.

I arrive with the evidence already organized into three clean layers. The ledger and its continuity with current traffic. The operative’s statement and the staging facility we broke. The breach itself—the split entry, the cleaner cell, the blade in the east corridor. Beside those, the Mage’s accounting of the bloodline over the last century: seven confirmed births, five removed early, one lost, one remaining. The pattern is no longer a private theory. It is a file that can be handed across a table.

Ayla sits...