Alexander POV
The last time I’d stepped into Elder Vaelin’s study, I was thirteen years old and terrified out of my mind. My fingers had been bloodied from the binding trials, my bones still aching from the shift. He’d looked at me then like a boy on the edge of a storm—uncertain if I’d break, or become something the world would fear.
Now I was older. Stronger. But no less afraid.
It was almost identical with the chamber as I recalled it, muffled, ruddy filled with dusty scrolls, fire flaring up and making long shadows on the cave walls. Elder Vaelin sat with his legs crossed before the fire, holding in his hands a long bone pipe through which he was drawing slow smoke spiralling up to the rafters. And his hair was silver to the root, and tied back in a woven crown of stone, which spoke
