There was a silence for a while, as Cathe and Arina blinked once and then twice. The air held the echo of something larger than them—the weight of an appeal, the aftertaste of a voice that had just announced calamity. Aiden's aura had not merely dispersed; it had landed on them, like a small, precise storm.
Such an aura and such skills, either one alone, needed lineage: a bloodline of history and lineage like Cathe's, or a life scarred by a thousand fights like Arina's. Both of them felt the wrongness of it at a physical level—like a foot in a room that shouldn't be there.
Both of them knew he was neither, and yet that was not the point. The point was the words. He hadn't written them. He hadn't signed the letter with this prophecy. The words should not have been in his mouth.
"What do… you mean, we all will die?" Cathe asked. Her voice trembled not from the cold but from a memory dug up and shoved into the light.
