LYSSARA
The morning after the bond closed, I woke up and lay in the dark for a long moment waiting for the low-frequency signal that had been broadcasting from a direction I was trying not to face for eleven months, and when I could not find it, I understood for the first time what silence actually felt like.
Not the forced silence of management. Not the deliberate architecture of naming it accurately and choosing around it. Just silence. The specific absence of something that had been present since the night of the Blood Moon Ceremony and that I had spent eleven months learning to live alongside, and that was now simply gone, and the gone was not painful the way I had expected it to be and was not empty the way I had feared it might be.
It was clean.
Zirelle was warm against the mattr
