Arielle's POV
The mark finished its transformation on a Sunday.
I knew it was Sunday because Wren had marked it on the calendar and I had started checking the calendar regularly without quite noticing I had begun to. The habit of days. The ordinary miracle of knowing what day it was.
It happened while I was in the library.
I was reading one of the older blood magic texts, a translation Lucien had ordered from a southern archive that had arrived the previous week. My feet were tucked under me in the chair. Lucien's chair, which I had claimed so thoroughly over the months that it had simply become my chair without any formal handover.
The mark went from pulse to silence.
Not an absence. A completion. The difference between a sound stopping and a sentence ending. One is an absence and t
