The Palace of Sunset Towers
They walk you down a hall with a floor of polished cloud — cool and springy, like walking on a trampoline made of fog — between rows of courtiers. Winged horses. Herons the size of rowboats. A fussy-looking cloud shaped exactly like an old man, complete with eyebrows.
All of them staring. All of them whispering. You catch “the lost Pearl” and “a human child, here” and once, awfully, “traitor.”
Sera walks through it with her chin high and her steps even, and only you, with your hand on her neck, can feel that she's shaking.
On the steps of the throne lounges a boy about your age — silvery-haired, wearing a cape he is clearly very proud of — riding a cushion-sized storm cloud the way you'd sit a beanbag chair. He looks you up and down and smirks the smirk of someone who has never once been sent to his room successfully.
And on the throne itself, wearing a crown of frozen lightning, sits the Queen.