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Fire.

Fire where he had always been ice.

He had built himself out of centuries of cold. He’d needed to, to survive what his kind had survived, and she had walked into the Archive with ink on her fingers and changed it all of it in a matter of weeks.

Even the shards had responded, which he hadn’t expected. The shards had reacted to them together in a way he had never seen before, in all the years that preceded her existence, which he was sure had to mean something.

But that was also the danger. And he had to keep her safe. Even if keeping her safe meant denying himself the one thing he had never wanted until now.

What he wanted now, he understood perfectly well. He simply no longer recognised the creature who wanted it. Since meeting her he’d started questioning centuries of planning, organising, existing. Everything he had believed himself to be had shifted beneath his feet.

And now they were watching.

He had seen it the moment the reassignment orders came through. The way the ink had dried too fast. The way names were replaced by symbols of authority rather than signatures.

Whatever had happened with the Hollow Wraith had broken a rule the Umbralyn did not tolerate: power without permission.

Maia and Julen were not meant to survive.

He was not meant to intervene.

Strike. Guard. Advance.

The drills continued. The city worsened with each passing day, tension tightening like a drawn wire. And the absence between him and Maia grew heavier, sharper.

But they were never truly far apart. He often felt her before he saw her by way of a subtle shift in the air around him, a reverberation that did not belong to the drill. His gaze flicked sideways without conscious thought.

Across the upper tier, Maia stood beside her new escort, Nuada, Selinne at her other shoulder. There was a small relief in who had been chosen; he had known Nuada to be noble. He’d seen him care. But he’d also seen him take human women like commodities.

Maia was thinner, he thought, with less colour in her cheeks than when he’d last spoken to her. Her hands folded carefully in front of her, as if she were holding herself back, the way he did.

She was watching the city.

She never saw him first. Always looking outward, searching, weighing everything up. An inquisitor’s habit.

But he saw her. He always did. He had known her movements for days now, even without seeing her.

Strike.

The formation broke. Orders were called and then the drill ended.

Their eyes found each other across the distance without warning, and something moved within him the way it always did.

But Caelith turned away before Maia could react. If she saw him hesitate or want, even, it would undo everything he had done to protect her. This had to be the limit of their interactions now, despite it hurting him far more than any monster ever could.

***

Exactly a week after the reassignment, dawn came wrong. Completely wrong.

A plan his faction had cultivated for years was finally coming to a head. He had known it would. He had helped shape it. He tried not to think about what it would cost. It was almost too much to think about.

He had not slept. He rarely did now. He thought of Maia, wondering if she was lying awake as he was, watching the dark thin to grey.

Without warning, a sharp tremor ran through the floor of his room, shaking the bed momentarily. He sat up, drawing his blade. A quake? No, this was different. It felt like a warning. A pulse. A—

A scream. Or the memory of one, already fading by the time he understood he’d heard it. He couldn’t have said whether it came from the corridor beyond his room, or from somewhere he had no right to hear at all.

Maia.