The Silent Heart of the World
A millennium is a long time, even for a star. The light from the Bridge-Star that watched over Aethelburg had traveled far out into the void, carrying its silent, harmonizing song to distant, dusty nebulae. On the island itself, time had woven a new tapestry over the old. The estate had been rebuilt several times, each iteration simpler, more organic, blending into the cliffside until it was little more than a graceful structure of living wood and fused stone, maintained not by human hands but by the will of the place itself.
The Wardens of this age were a pair, as they almost always were. Lyra, with senses that could taste the emotional weather of continents, and Kael, whose mind could trace the hidden geometries in the growth of a fern. They were the lates
