Tyla’s POV
Stability is a myth people tell themselves when they’re afraid of motion.
I learn that on the forty-ninth day.
It begins quietly—with a wrongness I feel before anyone speaks it aloud. The Veil doesn’t hum. It doesn’t tug. It doesn’t even watch the way it has been.
It… withdraws.
Not gone.
But distant.
Like a breath held too long.
I’m in the lower archives with three bonded pairs when it happens, helping them map convergence points that keep flaring out of rhythm. Ink bleeds oddly across the parchment, lines blurring where they shouldn’t.
One of the women rubs her arms. “Do you feel cold?”
“Yes,” I say automatically.
But it isn’t cold.
It’s absence.
The Mark at my collarbone dulls—not dimming, not failing—just no longer echoed by the world around it.
Arthur feels it
