The silence in the Cradle’s heart was no longer the screaming vacuum of Kael’s erasure. It was a heavy, waiting quiet, thick with the scent of ozone and cooled, glassed stone. Lyra’s silver light had not healed the wound in the world, but it had cauterized it. The chaotic energies were still, the air clear and cold as a tomb.
Ren did not move from where he had fallen. He was a man carved from grief, his shoulders bowed under a weight no sovereign should have to bear. Lyra knelt before him, her hands still framing his face, her forehead pressed against his. She was not pouring light into him; that would be like trying to fill the ocean with a cup. She was simply being a boundary. A shore. Her presence defined the edges of his despair, preventing it from becoming the entire world.
He was b
