Morning came anyway.
That was the thing nobody warned you about.
The world didn't pause just because something big happened in it. It kept moving. Light still came through at the same angle.
Birds still did their thing. And whatever you'd been carrying when you finally closed your eyes was still exactly where you'd left it when you opened them again.
Aelara was awake before the light got through the stones.
She lay still for a moment with the ceiling above her and let herself have those few seconds before her brain started sorting everything into piles. The chamber.
The marks spreading wall to wall like something breathing. The twins in the center of it, lit up and certain in a way that had made her chest hurt a little just to look at. And then afterwards, the ruined keep, and Vaelor's hand on her jaw, and the way all of it had felt, against every expectation she'd built for herself over the last several years, completely right.
