Serena blinked.
It was a small gesture, a tremor in her eyelashes that shouldn’t have meant anything… and yet, it meant everything. Because after that first blink came a second, slower one, followed by a gasp that didn’t seem to fit inside her lungs—as if the simple act of breathing were a forgotten language her body was trying to recall word by word. The glow of the torches reflected in her eyes, and for an instant I swore they were black, bottomless wells; then, as the light broke through them, they flickered to a dull, ashen green—the color of a forest smothered in dust.
She rose clumsily, like a newborn learning the weight of its own head. Her hands groped bare against the cold stone, and the touch of her fingers over the runes ignited a faint, reddish light that climbed like a sigh
