The tower lights never really went dark, but somebody called it night anyway.
We slept in shifts—if you could call lying still with one eye open sleep. I spent most of it inside the forge dimension, hands busy so the brain wouldn't replay Lucien's smile on loop.
Jax snored somewhere outside the shimmer wall, sounding like a landslide with asthma. Hana dozed against a pillar, her shawl spread out like a cocoon pulsing soft blue—monitoring us, or maybe dreaming for us.
The Darkharness peeled itself off my chest when I entered the pocket space. Metal pooled like ink around my feet, waiting.
I didn't build new miracles, just fixes—tightened the Grav-Edge's pull lattice, reinforced Hana's Lotus weave with a thin layer of frostglass thread. When the forge quieted, it looked tired. Same as me.
Two quick upgrades:
— Grav-Edge Core: Pulse Lattice
— micro-bursts at the end of Jax's swing; tighter well, faster collapse.
— Lotus Thread V2: Heartlink Amplifier
