They didn’t notice the quiet at first.
Because it wasn’t silent.
Birdsong still moved through the trees. Wind still shifted branches against one another in soft, restless murmurs. Their boots still made the small, human sounds of travel gravel shifting, leather creasing, breath steady in cool morning air.
But something underneath all of it was gone.
Aurelia felt it before she understood it.
A background hum she had carried for so long she’d mistaken it for the structure of the world itself.
She stopped walking.
Kane took two more steps before realizing. “What?”
She turned slowly in a circle, not searching, just orienting.
“It’s not there,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
She placed a hand lightly against her chest, not over her heart, but slightly to the left of it where the fracture ha
