Epilogue: The Reality
Six months later.
The hospital was long behind her. So was the oxygen-scented air and the way every heartbeat had felt borrowed—like she hadn’t fully reentered her body.
Life had resumed.
Classes, emails, old friends who didn’t know how to talk to a girl who had almost died. The world kept turning. Coffee shops reopened. Traffic clogged the streets. Eira found a part-time job at a local bookstore. Her father insisted on calling her twice a day—until she finally laughed and told him to stop treating her like a porcelain doll.
But some days, she still woke up searching for marble floors beneath her toes.
Sometimes she caught her reflection in a window and half-expected to see a crown of starlight.
Velandria had not faded. Not completely. It clung to the edges of
