The corridors behind her pressed like walls still closing in, their silence threaded with everything she could not name. Alina needed distance, a space where the weight of stone and shadow did not bear down so heavily. She told herself it was only air she wanted—air untouched by the memory of hushed deliberations and the taste of old arguments echoing against vaulted ceilings. That thought was easier to hold than the restless pulse beneath her wrist, or the way smoke still stirred faintly at her fingertips if she let her attention slip.
She wandered higher, taking staircases she had never climbed before, led more by instinct than intent. The castle seemed to stretch endlessly upward, stairwells tightening, air thinning, the architecture giving way to older bones. Dust thickened in the cor
