The word hung in the small stone chamber like something sacred, and Wren felt her entire understanding of the world tilt sideways, everything she'd been told about her own history rearranging itself around one single, impossible fact.
"That's not possible," she whispered, though even as she said it, the recognition she'd felt moments before crystallized into certainty, some deep, wordless part of her already accepting what her conscious mind was still struggling to comprehend. "Everyone told me — Elder Maren said both my parents died that night. She said my mother screamed for me while the west tower burned, that she never survived to see morning."
"She was meant to die that night," Torvald said quietly, kneeling beside the bed on Wren's other side, his weathered face carrying decades of
