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Julen lifted his hand, fingers trembling. “I didn’t see it. Just a glint. When I pulled back, it was already bleeding.” He shook his head, fear unfeigned. “The cut won’t close.”
That was true enough. The wound wasn’t deep but it looked wrong. The blood clung instead of falling, thickening at the edges as though reluctant to leave him.
“Containment risk,” one of the Umbralyn said immediately. “The Wraith—”
“If it’s with other glass—” the other cut in sharply, as if the first were about to reveal too much.
“It is,” Selinne offered. “Whatever’s appearing, it’s new. And if it’s shedding—”
The sentries didn’t wait for her to finish. One moved to Julen at once, grasping his wrist, helm lowering to examine the injury. The other turned back toward Selinne. “Lead the way. Now.”
Julen’s grip tightened on the sentry’s arm as pain lanced up his wrist, real this time. He sucked in a breath and caught Selinne’s eye.
Go.
She turned and led the remaining sentry down the side passage, boots quickening.
Julen was pulled the opposite direction.
“Don’t move,” the Umbralyn ordered, voice flat. “If contamination spreads—”
Julen nodded, jaw clenched, blood spotting the stone beneath his feet. And as the junction emptied, Maia slipped through the gap they’d carved out of risk and timing and pain.
The Umbralyn wing was quieter than the rest of the city, held in a suspended awareness. She felt it the instant she crossed the threshold, the subtle tightening in the air.
She did not hesitate. She walked quietly, every step measured.
The corridors narrowed, the stone darker, older. This part of the wing had not been built for comfort, or even for ease of movement. It was meant to endure.
She passed one junction. Then another. Somewhere in this wing he had stood the night of the first quake, hearing it before anyone else, before he had ever known her name. She’d give anything to go back to the beginning, to have those stolen moments in the Archive again.
The markings appeared ahead, faded designations etched into the stone. The nine doors she went past to reach him the night she first saw the stone.
Caelith’s wing.
She stopped before his door. The sigil remained unchanged, his designation still carved into the stone in ancient tongue. She attempted to read what it said below it.
Pending.
Her throat tightened. They hadn’t cleared his quarters, which meant they hadn’t decided what his absence meant.
Maia put her hand on the door and breathed in. The Umbralyn didn’t ward for intrusion the way humans did. They catalogued access and deferred exceptions.
The door resisted for a moment, stone grinding against stone. Then gave way with a low, reluctant groan, as though it had been waiting for a reason to open.
She crossed the threshold and felt it immediately. The absence of him. It was like stepping into a space where sound had been removed, leaving only the echo of what once filled it. The narrow cot, precisely made. The stripped desk.
On the table’s edge, half-hidden beneath a fold of dark cloth, sat a single wooden comb - dark-grained, longer in the teeth than a human would need, worn smooth along one edge by three hundred years of the same hand. She stared at it for a long moment, hating that she’d never once seen him using it. A simple, everyday moment she’d give anything to see.
She put it in her pocket without thinking about it.
Maia stood in the centre of the room, breath shallow, listening for that faint pull she remembered. The sensation that had drawn her here the first time, before she knew whose room this was.
Her gaze lifted to the wall.
The fracture map dominated it, carved deep into the stone, lines converging and splitting in patterns too deliberate to be decorative. She stepped closer without thinking, drawn toward the inward curve. It was the place where the fracture bent tight and dangerous, where the stone seemed to resist the eye.
Her fingers brushed the surface.
