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Chapter 10

Author: Zàbel
last update publish date: 2026-02-13 00:24:57

Third-person POV

The lab hummed with the familiar drone of Aether consoles, but the air felt thicker the next day. Draven was conspicuously absent, no charming smiles, no lingering stares. Instead, Prince Vaelor arrived with two silent escorts, their presence a formal shadow in the doorway. Mara and Elias exchanged glances but said nothing, turning back to their workstations as the Thalorians took positions near the sample vaults.

Lirian kept his head down, fingers flying over the resonance
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    Third-person POVThe lab hummed with the low pulse of crystal calibrators and the particular charged silence that precedes a very bad conversation.Then Elias's voice cracked it open."You have lost your mind," he said, slamming the data pad down on the secondary workstation hard enough that the plant's tendrils flinched. Blue light washed across his face, sharpening every edge of his expression. "Zafer is not Lirian. It is not possible. We were there, Mara. All three of us. We stood in that room and watched the Aether take him apart. There was nothing left. There was nothing."Mara leaned against the central table with her arms folded, her expression carrying that particular quality of hers — not indifference, but the patience of someone who had already done the grieving part of this conversation alone and arrived somewhere on the other side of it. It made Elias want to overturn the entire workstation."I ran the test myself," she said. "Privately. Full genetic sequencing, cross-refe

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    Zafer's POVI spent most of the day in the lab with Mara.The plant had grown bolder. Its tendrils now reached for me the moment I stepped through the door, curling gently around my wrists with a familiarity that should have felt strange and didn't. Mara put me to work on the simpler calibrations, her voice unhurried and precise as she walked me through each step. The work settled into my hands with uncomfortable ease, measurements and proportions arriving without effort, my fingers finding the right instruments before she named them, my instincts moving slightly ahead of my understanding.I did not examine it too closely. Three years of desert life had taught me that some things feel familiar to me without reason, and that looking directly at that feeling tends to make it disappear before you can learn anything from it.Late in the afternoon, Mara glanced at me over a glowing vial, her expression carrying that particular quality of hers , observation dressed as casualness. "The sove

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