The Ashstone sat on Kael's worktable like it was waiting for something.
Lira had noticed it the moment she entered the study — hard not to think that everything else in the room had the quality of objects placed with purpose and the Ashstone had the quality of an object that had placed itself.
It occupied the center of the worktable on a square of black velvet, surrounded by documents and reference texts that Kael had clearly pulled from the study's shelves in the hours she'd been at breakfast, arranged in the specific disorder of active research — not messy, but alive, the organized chaos of a mind working through a problem from multiple angles simultaneously.
The study itself she catalogs in the seconds before he looked up from the text he was reading.
Larger than the un
