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The quiet between them remained comfortable for a while before Caelyn finally closed the book across his knees. His fingers rested against the worn cover as he glanced toward her.

“Do… you miss it badly?” he asked hesitantly.

Elowynn knew exactly what he meant: home.

Her first instinct had been to think, Of course I do! But the longer she sat there, the harder the question became to answer. Missing Astermere felt far too small a word for what lived inside her now. It had not just simply disappeared. Everything had changed after its fall, the world shifting around the empty place it had left behind. She knew if she were to go back, it would be nothing but a crater, just as the stories whispered through the abbey claimed.

“Sometimes I still think I hear the observatory bells,” she admitted. “Even when I know they are gone.”

Caelyn was quiet for a long moment before responding.

“I think places leave echoes behind when people love them.”

Elowynn looked at him strangely, her brows pulling down in confusion. “That sounds like something an old scholar would say.”

A smile touched his mouth. “Sister Agatha says I spend too much time listening instead of speaking.”

Despite herself, Elowynn chuckled. The sound startled her, mostly because it had been so long since she had laughed at all. Caelyn looked surprised too, though not unhappy.

Somewhere beyond the garden, the abbey bells rang once more through the storm. Softer here, yes. Still mournful. Though they no longer seemed as frightening.

Elowynn leaned back against the cold stone wall beneath the alcove and listened to the continued song of the rain falling through the garden while the sea crashed endlessly below the cliffs.

Since fleeing from her home with her mother, pain and sadness had wrapped itself so tightly around her heart that some suns she forgot what it felt like to breathe without it.

Now, sitting beneath the garden alcove with Caelyn beside her, that crushing feeling had begun to ease.

Only a little, but it was enough.

Enough to draw a full breath.

Enough to believe that, some sun, the wound would become a scar.

Chapter Two

“There are some people who arrive quietly in your life and alter its course so gently you do not realize the shape of the change until many turnings later.”

— Unnamed Lumenshire Sister

Frostwane, 744 A.V.

It had taken two turnings for Elowynn to no longer wake every night believing Astermere Hold was collapsing around her.

The dreams still came, of course. Some struck her mind hard enough to steal the breath from her lungs, while others faded before morning, dissolving like mist beneath sunlight. Grief had not left her, nor did she think it ever truly would, but it no longer felt quite as wild and all-consuming as it had during those first terrible moons in the abbey. It had become something dull but still present. A deep ache in her heart. A stone she carried within her chest instead of a blade constantly twisting between her ribs.

Some suns she could almost forget the pain was even there. But other suns, it became impossible to breathe around.

Still, life in Lumenshire continued onward. The bells rang each morning at first light without fail. The Sisters moved through the stone corridors wrapped in their silver robes while incense and the ever-present scent of cedar smoke drifted through the halls. Storms rolled in from across the sea nearly every few suns during Frostwane, lashing rain against the cliffs below the abbey while the astrylite lanterns kept the gloom at bay.

Life became predictable.

Without meaning to, Elowynn had begun learning the rhythms of it all. She knew which hallways stayed warmest during storms and which staircases Sister Maelin used whenever she wished to avoid the stricter elder Sisters. She knew which windows overlooked the roughest stretch of sea cliffs and which gardens still bloomed as the weather turned colder. She even knew the exact bell when fresh bread was brought from the kitchens each morning, and best of all, she knew where to hide whenever the abbey grew too crowded or too loud around her.

Most often, she hid in the library or wherever Caelyn happened to be. She told herself it was coincidence, though the excuse grew less convincing with each passing sun. At some point, she had stopped searching for secluded places and started searching for him instead. She hadn’t meant for it to happen. It simply had.

At first, she had continued seeking him out because he felt like one of the few things in her life that had not changed. Caelyn never looked at her with the same guarded expression she had learned to recognize as pity. Many of the others carried that look in their eyes whenever they spoke to her. She was tired of it. But Caelyn never softened his voice as though grief had made her fragile, nor did he avoid speaking of Astermere like everyone else seemed to.

He simply treated her like herself. It had been startling how much that mattered.