The tower was silent, but it was not the kind of silence that brings rest or comfort to a tired body. It was the thick, pressurized silence that settles after a storm has passed through and left everything changed, the kind where the air itself feels like it is holding its breath and waiting to find out what comes next.
Alaric lay in the dark with his eyes wide open and his body completely still. His heart was still moving at the rhythm of adrenaline, still running the numbers of the night, still tracking every sound that filtered in from beyond the heavy chamber door. An hour ago he had been standing in a hallway with a sword in his hand and his father's fury pressed against him like a physical weight.
Now he was lying in a warm bed in a quiet room and the contrast between those two things was so sharp it felt almost unreal.
