Lirian's POVI know exactly when she decides on me.It is not a slow realization. It arrives the way a blade does — sudden, certain, already inside you before your body has registered the cold. One moment, Veyra is standing beside the King, watching Vaelor with that slow, knowing smile, and the next her eyes move to me, and something in them calculates, and I understand in the space between one breath and the next that I am the decision she has already made.She doesn't look at Vaelor when she moves. She looks at me.The Vorathian tech hits before I can process it, not Aether, not anything I have a framework for, some hybridized propulsion she wears under her ceremonial armor that activates in a single silent burst. The distance between us, fifteen meters, the width of the nexus chamber, collapses in a fraction of a second. Her hand closes around my arm. The world lurches.Then I am somewhere else.Not far. Forty meters, maybe fifty, dragged laterally across the chamber floor at a spe
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