The hidden chamber's emerald light lingered, diffused now—soft as moss, gentle as dusk—casting every outline in shifting shades of green and gold. Silence held them, but it was a silence alive with pulse and promise: the breathless hush after thunder, when the world waits for new growth to rise from spent earth.
Mikhailis stood at the heart of it all—barefoot, tousled, breath still uneven. The mark of longing clung to his skin and his gaze: lips reddened, a flush at his neck, the faint shimmer of sweat at his temple. He was both exhausted and impossibly alive, held together by the invisible threads now running between himself and the three women who surrounded him, each one changed by what had passed.
