06/03/2025 Snippet, IN THE HALLS OF THE LILY KING.

Needed to workshop this a little today.

…

He read while he ate, because this was going to be a working breakfast. Serenity had handed him a few newsheets from her own stack, with the slight smile of somebody who was dividing up a boring job. “The journalists here are remarkably prone to gossip,” she had told him. “Please look for anything topical.”

“Topical?” snorted Waylon. “Compared to what? This place calls anything that happened less than a decade ago ‘current events.’” He started going through the papers anyway. You never knew.

Five minutes later, Waylon snorted. “The Gazette claims it’s over a thousand years old, right?”

“It is,” Serenity replied.

“It reads like it.”

“I disagree.” A beat. “Its editors no longer spit and hiss at the sight of an Old American loan-word.”

Waylon smirked. He’d wondered if the woman had any humor in her. “Where we can see. Anyway, there’s nothing here that’s, ah, of interest to us. Not domestically, at least. Not even a report of the murder.”

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