Lenora's POV
Corvan wrote to Marcelline.
He told me about it the evening before he sent the letter. We were at the confluence's evening gathering — the regular meal that the settlement held twice a week, the kind of communal practice that builds the texture of belonging rather than just its structure.
He sat beside me and said: "I wrote to her."
"What did you say?"
"I said I know what she did. I said I don't forgive her, and I may never." He looked at the communal fire. "And I said I understand now why she was afraid."
I looked at him.
"The prophecy," he said. "She spent forty years afraid of change. She built everything she could to stop it." He paused. "And it happened anyway. Not because the prophecy forced it. Because you chose to be here and you chose to keep going and you chos
