The dragon tooth rested there on the glossy obsidian of my desk, starkly white in form against the advancing gloom of my room. An attraction more than that; it was also a tether. Silas's voice, a sweet, polite hum of scholarly curiosity, continued to echo in my mind's empty corners, a reminder of unrepaired damage that I do so well to have made by walls around my past.
And the next day, I passed through the Academy like a specter: my physical presence occupied lecture halls and crowded corridors, while my mind transpired a thousand miles away, confused by calculation and contingency. The arrival of the Nocturne delegation had cast a long, cold shadow over Ashborn.
