SOREN
The bed was too soft for someone who'd just held divinity in their mortal hands.
I laid Eris down carefully, adjusting pillows beneath her head, smoothing ash-streaked hair away from her face.
Her skin still burned under my touch, hot enough that I half-expected the silk sheets to char.
But they didn't. Just darkened slightly where her body pressed against them, absorbing heat that had nowhere else to go.
The physicians arrived in a rush of footsteps and medical bags, three of them led by Ryse himself.
The best healers in the empire... two men in their middle years and one ancient woman whose hands shook with age but whose eyes remained sharp as winter stars.
They descended on Eris like crows on a battlefield.
Checking pulse, breathing, pupil dilation. Examining the cracks spider-webbing across her skin, touching them gently, murmuring to each other in the shorthand language all physicians seemed to share.
