Edric’s attention shifted first, not because Leone had moved, but because sothing in the shadows had.
It was subtle at first, a disturbance at the edge of perception, the kind of presence that did not announce itself but pressed against the air all the sa. His instincts sharpened at once. The ruin around them had grown too still, too expectant, and in that instant of distraction Leone moved.
The blade flashed.
Edric reacted on instinct more than thought. He shoved her away with a force that sent her stumbling backward, and the montum of it drove her head against the broken stone behind her. The sound was sharp and sickening in the quiet. Leone crumpled almost at once, her body sliding down into the rubble as consciousness fled from her.
Edric’s breath stalled.
For one brief second, he simply stood there, his gaze fixed on her fallen form. Then the danger in the dark returned to him with brutal clarity, and he turned toward the movent he had sensed earlier. His hand lifted, fingers already shaping a rune in the air.
The spell snapped into place at once.
A net of force caught the intruder before the shadow could flee, dragging them into view with violent precision. The figure stumbled, caught off guard, and Edric’s eyes narrowed as the truth erged.
One of the King’s spies.
Of course.
Edric did not allow the panic that had flickered through him to reach his face. He straightened slowly, his expression cold and unreadable once more, as though none of this had shaken him in the slightest. The spy looked between him and Leone’s unconscious form, clearly uncertain whether they had arrived too late or at exactly the wrong ti.
"Take her ho," Edric said evenly, his voice carrying none of the strain he felt tightening beneath his ribs. "Bring Lord Leone Caelvaris back to her estate before you report anything to the King."
The spy hesitated only a mont before bowing his head.
Edric gave no further explanation.
He did not look at Leone again. He did not allow himself to linger long enough to think about what had almost happened, or why she had reached for a blade with such desperate certainty.
Instead, he turned away from the ruins and walked off into the dark, leaving the shattered estate behind him and carrying the weight of the night with him in silence.
-----
Aveline spent the next several hours buried in work with the kind of focused intensity that made ti feel irrelevant.
Lucien had given her free rein in the lab, along with an almost baffling amount of trust, and once she realized he truly ant it, she stopped hovering at the threshold of caution and began to move through the room as though it had always belonged to her.
He had shown her how to use the instrunts, how to read the runes etched into the apparatus, how to listen for the subtle differences in frequency that made one reaction fail and another succeed.
He had explained more than anyone had ever bothered to explain to her before, and in exchange, he had handed her permission to touch anything she needed, to open any drawer, to inspect any shelf, to use any material that helped her learn.
For Aveline, that kind of freedom felt almost dangerous.
It was exhilarating.
She moved from one table to another with quiet purpose, her hands already dusted with aetherstone powder, her mind flicking rapidly from one observation to the next. The lab was full of things most people would have treated as treasure, but she treated them as tools, and that in itself made her unusually valuable.
She had a gift for mory that was nearly frightening in its precision. She rembered colors not as broad impressions but as exact shades, each one anchored in her mind with a clarity so complete it was almost unfair.
She rembered the texture of stone, the faint differences in weight, the subtle shift in temperature when two materials responded differently to the sa rune.
And with that mory, and the knowledge Lucien had begun to give her, she started to piece sothing together.
The pill Theron had once given Hamilton had not left her mind.
She had not forgotten its shape, its sheen, its oddness. She rembered the way the capsule had looked in his hand, the exact hue of its surface, the faint unevenness at the edge where the light had caught it.
She had stored it away without aning to, the way she stored away nearly everything else, and now, with the stones laid out before her and their frequencies humming in her mind, she finally understood enough to try.
It took patience.
It took trial and error.
It took a dozen near-misses and several monts of muttered frustration when the ingredients did not behave the way she wanted them to.
But Aveline did not quit.
She adjusted the resonance of the stones. She recalibrated the ratio of the pulverized mineral base. She compared the tones in the lab against the mory of the pill’s surface until the rhythm in her head began to settle into sothing coherent.
At last, after so much concentrated effort that the world outside the lab had nearly ceased to exist, the shape she had been chasing finally ca together.
A pill.
Small. Smooth. Perfectly ford.
Aveline held it up to the light, her eyes widening with a triumph that was as sharp as it was private.
She had done it.
A grin broke across her face before she could stop it, bright and unguarded, the kind that made her look far younger than the sharpness in her gaze usually suggested. She turned the pill between her fingers, fascinated by the neat little thing she had created from mory, calculation, and instinct.
By the ti she finally left the lab, she was in an unusually good mood.
She stepped out with the pill still safely in hand, her thoughts already racing toward what else she might recreate next, what other secrets she might tease from the materials Lucien had given her.
Her expression was lightly pleased, almost smug, as she crossed the threshold and lifted her head.
Then she stopped.
Aelion stood waiting in front of her, and the mont Aveline saw him, the lightness she had carried from the lab began to ebb away. He looked serious in a way that was unusual even for him, the shadows along his face suggesting that whatever he had co to tell her was not the sort of thing one said carelessly in a corridor.
Aveline’s fingers tightened around the pill.
Her smile faded, not entirely, but enough to beco guarded, alert, asured. She did not know what this was about, only that the air around him had changed. Aelion’s gaze settled on her with a weight that made her pulse quicken despite herself.
"I have found sothing," he said.
Before she could ask what he ant, he took her hand and guided her away from the doorway, away from the passing noise of the hall, toward a quiet corner where no one would easily overhear them. His grip was steady, purposeful, as though he did not trust even the walls with what he was about to reveal.
Aveline’s heart began to beat harder.
When he finally stopped, he turned to her fully, and the gravity in his expression made her stomach tighten.
"Guess what?" he said, and there was the faintest edge of disbelief in his voice now, as though he still found the thing absurd enough to laugh at if it had not been so significant. "My grandfather had a sister. A bastard, like ."
Aveline stared at him.
Her fingers, still curled around the pill, went cold.
Aelion lifted his brows slightly, watching her reaction with careful attention, then leaned down just enough that his next words brushed close to her ear.
"And do you know what Lucien Caelvaris, the man who grew up with her, called her?"
Aveline’s heart thudded painfully once.
Then again.
The world seed to draw in around that single suspended mont, the air growing thin and strange.
Aelion’s voice dropped into a whisper.
"Leveret."
Aveline’s breath caught so abruptly it almost hurt.
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