Chapter 32: The Open Page, Again
The walk back was a journey through a world healing. The purple tint bled from the sky with each league they put between themselves and the wastes. The whispering wind fell silent, replaced by the ordinary rustle of dry grass. The glassy ground gave way to stone, then to hard-packed earth. It was as if the blight had been a fever, now breaking.
Elara was weak, leaning heavily on Kaelen, but she grew stronger with every step toward the world she had saved. Her magic was gone, not hollowed out, but spent, like a fire that had burned to ash after warming a frozen room. She felt its absence not as a loss, but as a peace. The constant, humming pressure, the terrible calculus of cost, was silent.
