Mia spun around, the torn journal clutched tight against her chest, every instinct screaming at her to run even as her feet stayed rooted to the stone floor.
A woman stood near the chamber's entrance, though Mia hadn't heard her arrive, hadn't sensed the door opening a second time. She was old — impossibly old, Mia thought, though her posture carried none of the frailty the word usually implied, standing straight and still as the stone pillars around her. Her eyes, when they found Mia's, held the same patient, ancient quality Mia remembered from Malakor's borrowed gaze, though nothing else about her felt remotely similar. There was no hunger in this woman's stillness, no threat coiled beneath it — only the weight of someone who had been waiting so long that waiting itself had become a kin
