Six months after the last fault line.
I woke at two before dawn out of habit rather than necessity. The fault lines were gone. The pulse that had woken me every morning for months had resolved into the seam’s slower rhythm, which was not an alarm but a presence, the steady background frequency of a healing world doing what healing worlds do when you give them time and space and the right conditions.
Caelan was already awake.
He was always already awake at this hour, a seven century habit that predated me and would presumably outlast the specific reason I had for waking at the same time. We had stopped commenting on it. It was simply one of the ways our rhythms had aligned, not because either of us had adjusted to the other but because we were both people who existed most honestly in the
