The realm’s first morning as a whole thing was unremarkable.
That was what struck me most about it. I had expected something visible, some atmospheric declaration that two halves of a world had found each other after seven centuries, but the sunrise came the same way it always did, violet at the horizon bleeding into the silver light that the forest reflected upward, the Ashwood Court waking to its ordinary sounds, the castle staff beginning the routines that structured Vaelthorn’s days.
The difference was underneath.
I felt it through the soles of my feet when I stood on the stone floor of my bedroom in the early dark before the household woke. The pulse was different. Not the fault lines, those were gone, their rhythm resolved into the quiet of healed things. What remained was somethi
