Chapter 120 - Masked Betrayal

The captain's voice came again, cutting across the damp, close air like the sudden flash of a drawn blade — sharper this time, more urgent — yet the instant it reached his ears, he knew something was wrong. The sound no longer seemed anchored to the Hall. It had slipped free of the walls, detached from the stone, from any fixed point in space. It was slippery, uncertain — the way a reflection distorts in a rippling pool when the wind skims across its surface. One moment, he felt her presence just behind his shoulder, close enough that a turn of the head should have brought her into sight; the next, her words seemed to have been lifted entirely from this world and set down somewhere far away, in a place where the concept of distance bent into unfamiliar shapes.