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“You could at least sound certain.”

“I could,” he said. “But I’m not going to.”

She laughed - quietly, barely anything and entirely at herself - and she felt it travel down her arm, and into the glass. She saw the shard flare slightly. “Caelith—”

“Don’t,” he said.

“I didn’t do anything.”

The flare faded. He let go a moment later, and the shard went dark.

“It is inert,” he said, and set it down on the cloth, squarely, the way Orell straightened a fragment to make a point.

She sighed and pressed her lips together and did not look up for some time, and beside her, Caelith went back to reading as though nothing whatsoever had occurred. Across the table, Julen’s quill had stopped.

Julen noticed. He noticed everything.

***

The next evening, Maia and Julen were made to stay studying into the growing dark. The fragments had begun responding more violently to the tremors throughout the day, their pulses growing sharper with every disturbance beneath the stone. The senior scholars had ordered the readings monitored through the night. Caelith, to Maia’s disappointment, had not shown all day.

“Maia,” Julen started, the spectacles he wore when he worked perched on the ends of his nose as he studied one of the affected fragments. “Will you humour me for a second?”

“Sure. But if it’s to warn me about the Umbralyn, don’t bother. I’ve already received that message loud and clear.”

Julen rolled his eyes. “Look, Colwyn, I don’t want to get involved. You know what my father thinks of those… things.” He hesitated, turning his quill over once in his fingers before he spoke again. “But I just wanted to ask, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, too fast. “I know what you think and it’s not like that. I’m just worried. We still seem so far from understanding the fragments. I’m afraid it’ll be too late. And Caelith feels the same way.”

Not a lie. But not the whole truth either.

Julen was quiet for a moment. “To tell you the truth, I keep thinking about the girl who left the village with one satchel,” he said finally, not looking at her. “You talked about her like she was someone else already, back on the road to Meridon. I didn’t understand what you meant then.” He glanced up. “I think I do now. I just don’t know if I like where she’s headed.”

Maia didn’t answer right away. There was nothing accusing in it, only something tired and a little sad.

“I’m still her, Julen,” she said quietly. “I’m just… more, too. I think we all are.”

He nodded, though it didn’t look like agreement so much as acceptance. He looked back to the shards.

“Well, wherever he is, even if he’s skulking in the shadows, the shards sense it,” he said, changing the subject, though something in his voice hadn’t quite recovered.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

A subtle pulse ran through the table, followed by a sharper tremor through the floor. Something else was stirring.

“I haven’t seen them do that,” she murmured.

Julen shrugged. “I have. When he’s missing.”

But Maia knew this wasn’t only his absence. The air had changed. It carried the kind of pressure that gathered before lightning split the sky. The shards responded to that, not the weather.

“Maybe he’s—”

The words died as a tremor shivered through the fragments.

Julen frowned. “That’s new.”

Maia swallowed. “Maybe the wards are reacting to the storm,” she said, though she knew better.