She found me in the lower library on a Thursday.
Not through the bridge, not through Aine, not in any of the ways that most people announced themselves in Vaelthorn because most people had learned that showing up without warning in the king’s castle was not received warmly. Lira simply appeared, the way she had been appearing since the convergence, stepping from the seam into the physical world with the ease of someone moving between rooms.
She was carrying something.
I had been reading at the library’s central table, the archive open around me in its physical form, going through the pre-Severance records that Verath had been translating into language accessible to people who had not spent seven centuries in the In Between.
It was slow work and deeply absorbing and I had been at it for
