FAZER LOGINAnara"Zephyr was mid-sentence when my arm caught fire."Not my arm. That was the part that took me a second to understand, standing in the library with my hand pressed flat against the shelf and Zephyr watching me with those calm violet eyes. Not my arm. Not my pain. Something moving through the bond like a hot current, sharp and bright and completely foreign in the way that only meant one thing.I was on my feet before I thought about it."Anara." Zephyr's voice was steady."Kaelen's hurt," I said.I was already walking.He didn't try to stop me. I heard him set down his book behind me and I was out of the library and into the corridor before the door finished swinging, moving through the bond's pull the way you follow a sound you can't unhear. The pain had already dulled slightly, blunted at the edges the way pain does when the worst of it has passed, but the echo of it still sat against my forearm like a burn. Hot. Specific.I found him in the east corridor.He was sitting on a lo
Anara"He's two floors down."That was the first thing I knew when I opened my eyes. Not the time. Not how long I had slept. Kaelen. Two floors below me, already awake, his focus settled on something with the kind of quiet that meant he had been up for hours before I stirred.I lay still and stared at the ceiling.The bond sat differently from Seraphis. That was the first thing I tried to work out in those first strange moments of waking. Seraphis was mine, old and familiar and woven into me so deeply I sometimes forgot she was separate. What I was feeling now was not that. It was something additional, something sitting at the edge of my awareness the way you sense a person in a dark room before you see them. Kaelen's location. His mood, focused and contained, carrying something underneath it I couldn't name yet. The specific quality of his attention, pointed elsewhere but not unaware.I could read him the way you read weather before it arrives.I stared at the ceiling for another few
I had not planned it.That was the part I kept turning over in my head even as I crossed the training yard toward her, even as my footsteps slowed and Nyx pressed forward in my chest like he was done waiting for me to be ready. I had not woken up that morning with any kind of intention. I had come to the yard because I always came to the yard at dawn, because the quiet helped, because it was the one hour of the day when Nyx's noise dropped to something almost bearable.Then I saw her, and nothing was bearable anymore.Anara was running drills barefoot on the packed dirt, her dark hair loose, her movements sharp and precise in the low grey light. She hadn't heard me yet. I stood at the edge of the yard and watched her and felt Nyx surge so hard against my ribs that my breath caught.*Now,* he said. He had been saying it for three years. But this time it didn't sound like desperation. It sounded like inevitability.I crossed the yard before I made a decision to move.She turned when I w
AnaraThe sunlight dimmed through the curtain straight down to my face. Slowly I opened my eyes, my hands searching for Kaelen,he had no way to be found. Searched again, while slowly opening my eyes, he was no way in the room to be found.“Where could he have been this early morning!” I questioned myself, sat up in the bed sluggishly.Last night was really stressful and now there is no way to be found. Could it be that he went out to train? No! It's too early for that.“Kaelen! Kaelen?? Where are you?” I called out, sluggishly standing up from the bed as I walked to the door. Opened the bathroom door yet he found no way to be found.“ Where could he be?” Not again this early morning!Standing there for a while, my mind runs through where he could be. Something seems off but I couldn't place my hand exactly where and what it was. I just knew something is wrong with the pack and I need to see Kaelen now. So I can speak to him about it.Or was I over-thinking it? Maybe, I was just overth
AnaraWe stayed in Nightveil for three days.The first day was Lyra. The second day was my father and the conversation about Riven's investigation and the account that had been used in his name. That conversation was harder than the one with Lyra, not because my father was cruel about it but because he was not. He sat across from me in the same reading room where he had once told me that a dead woman's ghost had more claim on this pack than I did, and he listened to what I told him and his face did things I had never seen it do and when I finished he was quiet for a long time."She used my name," he said."Yes," I said."To kill a man.""Yes."He looked at the window. "I gave her everything she asked for," he said. Not defensively. The dull, factual quality of a man reviewing a ledger. "Every resource, every advantage, every freedom. I gave her everything I denied you and she used it to become something I don't entirely recognize.""She became something the power made her," I said. "W
AnaraLyra was in the garden when I arrived.Not the throne room. Not the formal receiving rooms or the ceremonial spaces that the Nightveil palace used for things that needed to be witnessed. She was in the private garden at the back of the east wing, the one that had been our mother's and that neither of us had been welcome in as children for different reasons. She was sitting on the stone bench near the old apple tree with her hands folded in her lap and she looked, in the afternoon light, more like herself than I had seen her look in years.More like the girl I remembered from before the distance between us had calcified into something permanent.Kaelen stayed inside with Asgard and two of the soldiers. He had walked me to the garden door and paused there and I had said, "I'll come get you if I need you," and he had said, "I know," and stepped back.I crossed the garden alone.Lyra watched me come. She did not stand up. I sat down on the other end of the bench and we looked at the







