Verret’s Pov
I stood by the high window and watched the courtyard fold itself into twilight, the last of the day’s heat bleeding slow and red into the stones. For twenty years I had walked this world like a man with his feet in the sea: always wet with searching, always salt-stung with disappointment. Tonight the wind tasted different, thick with possibility, heavy with the scent of fate.
I could not believe it. The discovery did not arrive with a trumpet or a herald; it arrived instead like a small, insolent footstep at my door.
After two decades of threadbare hope, after rites that ate my years and bargains that shaved the edges of my life away, she was simply placed before me, as if the world had grown tired of hiding what I had sought.
I am old by most reckonings. Older than the k
