Kael knew something was wrong the moment he walked into the hall. It wasn’t the kind of quiet that follows respect—no, this was brittle, tense, like a room pretending everything had settled when, really, the wounds still bled underneath. All attention drilled down on Nyra, and she stood right at the center, rigid as stone, wrapped in a gown that had failed her in the worst way, while everyone else lingered on her with eyes sharp as unsheathed knives.
He didn’t move at first. It wasn’t hesitation, or confusion. It was like, for a second, his mind refused to process this as just another incident—it was bigger, wrong at some basic level, like something inside the world itself had slipped out of alignment while he’d been gone.
Nyra stood in the empty space where laughter used to echo, but no
