ALEXANDER
More days have passed.
I’ve stopped counting those too. Counting implies progress — the accumulation of something moving toward an endpoint. There is no endpoint. There is only the same hollow morning after the same sleepless night, and the same answer waiting for me every time I ask if there’s news.
Nothing.
She has vanished. Not the way people vanish when they run, leaving traces — footprints, sightings, the warmth of a recently used shelter. But she has vanished completely. Finally. As though she was never in the world at all.
I have gone through more witches than I can count. Each one brought in with their bowls and their chants and their careful explanations of what they need to work with. Each one going still in the same way Mara went still — that particular, dreadful
