The memories arrived that night like water finding cracks in stone — not a flood, not yet, but insistent. Inevitable.
She did not sleep.
She sat with her back against the wall and let them come, one by one, each one a fragment that fit against the others like pieces of something she was only beginning to understand the full shape of.
A corridor, not this one. Wider. Older stone. The smell of torch smoke and cold authority.
Her wrists. The heavier chains.
Voices arguing — multiple voices, and beneath them, one that cut through the others not by volume but by certainty. A voice she now had a face for.
“Move aside, Draven.” A voice that was not Kael’s. Older. Carrying the specific tone of someone accustomed to being the last word.
“No”. That one was Kael’s. Quiet. Final. The voice of a
