It happened on a morning sixty-seven years after Selena's rebirth, seventy-two years after she first felt illness creeping into her bones. Aether was twenty-two now, Aurora was fifty-two, and the world had changed in ways both subtle and profound. The Commonwealth model had spread to forty-three cities across three continents, not through conquest or coercion but through voluntary adoption, through people seeing what worked and choosing to implement it themselves.
Selena woke before dawn in a small house they kept in the mountains north of Ashborne, a place they retreated to when the weight of guardianship required solitude and perspective. Dante slept beside her, his breathing deep and even, storm winds stirring gently in his dreams. She lay still for a moment, feeling something different in the air, something she couldn't immediately name.
Then she felt it—or rather, felt the absence of it.
The marrow.
