Silence clung to the tomb like a living thing.
Not the soft, reverent silence of a holy place—
but the aftermath of a revelation so vast that even the air seemed afraid to move.
Lindarion hadn't looked away from the now-sealed fissure. His expression wasn't blank. It wasn't shocked. It wasn't broken.
It was focused.
The kind of focus that came only when the world rearranged itself in a single heartbeat.
Nysha watched him the way one watches a cliff begin to crack—quiet, cautious, ready to move but not sure which direction safety lay. "Say something," she whispered.
Lindarion didn't.
He breathed once, slow and deliberate.
The starlight that lingered in his eyes dimmed into something colder. Not cruelty. Not emptiness.
Resolve.
Ashwing clung to his shoulder with stiff wings, voice trembling. "Lindarion… that… that wasn't supposed to happen. Memories don't talk back. They don't look at you. That wasn't normal." His claws dug into the prince's mantle. "Say something, please."
