Dax's POV
I don't sleep the night before, and I don't try to. Sera finds me on the packhouse steps instead, sometime past midnight, wrapped in a blanket she's clearly brought for both of us rather than just herself, and she sits down beside me without asking whether I want the company.
"You don't have to talk about it," she says after a while, "but I don't think you should carry it alone into that chamber tomorrow, whatever it is."
I look at her for a long moment, and I think about all the versions of this story I've given people over the years—Ren, who knows the shape of it but not the weight; Thessaly, who's known me long enough to guess at pieces I've never confirmed outright; even myself, most days, the sanitised account I've repeated so often it's started to feel truer than what ac
