[POV: Auren]
The silence in the chapel was a judgment.
Caldan's question, low and venomous, hung in the sacred air between them, a serpent coiled and ready to strike. Did you touch her?
Auren could feel the weight of his cousin's stare, a physical pressure. He looked into Caldan's eyes and saw a stranger. The warm, molten gold he remembered from their youth, the eyes that could flash with quick humor or righteous anger, were gone. In their place was something cold, something dead. The eyes of a man who had been to the Abyss and brought a piece of it back with him.
He didn't answer. How could he?
How could he explain the tangled, chaotic truth of the past weeks in a single word? How could he say, No, I did not touch her as a lover, but I held her as she fell apart? How could he confess, I did not desire her body, but I was drawn to the fire of her spirit, a fire that has been so absent from my own life?
