LYSSARA
I went down. Not because the woman in the courtyard had asked me to, and not because the situation required me to perform the descent as a sovereign act. Because the woman looking up at the window with the expression of someone who had been waiting to be found had something to say, and the saying of it was going to matter, and I was not going to receive it through glass.
The courtyard has hosted significant events. And it was still carrying an atmospheric residue of it. The founding era guardians had assembled their correct formation around the pack house, and the assembly had changed something in the air, not dramatically, not theatrically, the specific shift of an ancient architecture clicking into its correct configuration after four months of being prevented from doing so and
