Wulv turned his head toward her, his gaze intense, silently waiting for her to elaborate. When she didn’t immediately continue, he kept his eyes on her until Amethyst let out a soft, knowing huff.

"Normally," she noted, "you would have protested. You would have said "no" immediately and claimed she wasn’t ready to handle something of this magnitude."

Wulv’s frown deepened, a shadow of guilt crossing his face before it was replaced by a hard, pragmatic resolve. "That was before. This is now. The present has made it painfully clear that my past choices regarding her, my attempts to shield her have been entirely wrong."

Amethyst took in his admission, her expression softening just a fraction. She gave a slow, deliberate nod.

"Then I say let Lunara handle this problem herself," she reiterated. "Because, despite her naivety, she actually made several valid points in her argument with you. If she truly believes she can be the bridge between our people and the humans, let her walk that bridge, let her see if her friendships can survive the weight of a crown."

Wulv raised a brow, the flickers of anger in his eyes replaced by the cold, calculating focus of a king. He leaned back, signaling for Amethyst to continue her line of reasoning.

"You see," Amethyst said, her voice dropping into a more clinical, strategic register. "Unlike the Apelings, who have their cursed clans to fall back on to preserve their lineages and godling groups, we and the others are not as privileged. We lack that depth of infrastructure. Once this expansion begins and our people scatter, we risk losing contact with a significant portion of our population."

She leaned forward, her eyes locking onto Wulv’s. "Especially since your plan involves keeping our official contact with them to a minimum, offering them no direct help for the challenges they are bound to face to ensure their growth. It is a harsh path, Wulv."

She gestured toward the door where Lunara had recently been expelled. "Lunara made a point that we cannot ignore. If she were to become the Queen of a dominant human nation, she wouldn’t just be a figurehead. She would be a tether. She could solve the very issues we cannot touch without compromising the original goal. She could help our people overcome localized challenges, oversee the integration from the inside, and act as a guardian, one who already speaks the human tongue and understands their convoluted hearts."

Amethyst paused to let the weight of the suggestion sink in. "She is offering to be the safety net you refuse to provide. The question is, are you willing to let her take the fall if that net snaps?"

Amethyst leaned in "This last part is even more important to you and the werewolf godlings as a whole. Her presence on a human throne would be seen as an effort from us. It would be a living beacon, reminding those who have left of where they came from, assuring them that they always have a home to return to if the world outside becomes too much."

She watched him closely, sensing the internal shift. "If this expansion takes place as it was designed, many of the ancestral bonds the godlings share will be frayed, perhaps even lost. But with Lunara acting as a centralized pillar amongst the humans, that damage is minimized. It turns a chaotic scattering into a structured diaspora."

Wulv remained motionless, but the aura around him changed. Amethyst knew exactly what she was doing, she was poking at the one thing Wulv tried to keep separate from his sister "his Constellation gift"

When Wulv looked at a map or a political landscape, his gift allowed him to see paths and strategy as clearly as stars in the night sky. It made him a peerless tactician, but at a terrible price. When the gift was in effect, Wulv ceased to be a brother. He became a cold engine of logic. In that state, Lunara wasn’t a sibling to be protected, she was a piece on the board. Emotions were merely variables to be calculated, never an anchor for his resolve.

He had spent years trying to keep Lunara out of his "tactical sight" to preserve his love for her, but Amethyst had just laid out a plan that his strategic mind was already beginning to process with quick efficiency.

"I can see the gears turning, Wulv," Amethyst whispered. "Stop looking at her as the girl you pampered. Look at her as the Queen she is offering to be."

The silence in the office was long, stripping the warmth Ripple had left behind. Wulv’s eyes, once turbulent with frustration, smoothed over into a terrifying, glassy calm.

As a Paragon, his Constellation Gift became a passive ability, a lens he could never truly take off. Amethyst’s suggestion acted like a spark in a dark room, illuminating a path so strategically sound that his mind began building the architecture of the plan before he could even consciously agree to it.

In those few seconds, Lunara ceased to be the sister he had just shouted at. She became an asset "Queen-Consort". She became a node for cultural Anchor. He saw exactly how to manipulate the Silver Kingdom’s greed, how to stifle the Björn’s eventual outrage, and how to use Lunara’s genuine heart as the perfect "honest" front for a much deeper geopolitical game. He saw how far he could push her, where her breaking points were, and how to reinforce them.

It was efficient. It was perfect. And it was utterly soulless.

Wulv let out a long, shuddering breath, the sound of a man trying to remind himself he was still flesh and blood. He turned his gaze toward Amethyst. The look in his eyes was filled with frustruation, a mixture of the cold logic and the lingering, dying embers of a brother’s guilt.

Amethyst didn’t flinch. She read the calculation in his pupils and the grim resignation in the set of his jaw. She knew that by inviting the strategist to the table, the brother had just been shoved into a corner.

"You have the plan," Amethyst said softly, her voice acknowledging the transition. "You already know how to make it work better than I suggested."

"I do," Wulv replied, his voice devoid of its earlier heat. "But if I do this... if I set her on this path, there is no turning back. I will have to drive her. I will have to treat her as the sovereign she claims to be, with all the ruthlessness that entails."

He looked at his hands, then back at his stepmother. "Are you truly prepared to watch me break her spirit to mold her into the Queen we will need?"

Amethyst’s laughter was sharp, ringing through the office with an edge that felt entirely at odds with the gravity of the conversation. "You must think of me as a most peculiar mother, Wulv," she said, her eyes glinting. "Willing to push her own daughter into the meat grinder of human politics, to use her as a piece on your board."

Her tone shifted then, turning distant and old, reminding Wulv she was "This is what Lunara has begged for. We denied her, believing we were protecting her, yet she chases it still. She runs toward the fire with her eyes wide and her heart open. We might as well hand it to her. Perhaps the heat of a real throne is the only thing that will finally sear away that stubborn naivety."

She stood up, the movement graceful. "The humans may teach her the lessons we have been too soft to impart. And as for my motherly duties? I have been more than indulgent. I have been downright sentimental."

She began to pace toward the door, her voice taking on a teaching quality. "In the eyes of my kind, Wulv, raising offspring for this long is an anomaly. A dragonling of her age and power should have left the nest decades ago to carve her own path through the world. It was only through the influence of you and your father that I learned to tolerate, even love motherhood. But even a Dragon’s patience has its limits. It is becoming a nuisance."

She paused at the threshold, her hand resting on the heavy wood of the door. She didn’t look back as she delivered her final challenge.

"I have said enough. The tactical path is clear to you. Now, all that remains is the question of your resolve, do you have the heart to toss your sister into the flames and watch her burn? Or rather... to see if she emerges from the ash as something worth leading?"

With a soft click of the latch, she was gone, leaving Wulv alone in a room that felt suddenly much colder.

He sat in the heavy silence of his office for a long time, his eyes closed as the passive hum of his Constellation Gift began to map out the possible paths. Finally, his physical form grew still as he shifted his consciousness, breaching the veil of the material world to reach into the dimensional space where interaction with the Divine was possible.