Vane woke at the fourth hour to an absence rather than a sound — the specific quiet of a house with one fewer heartbeat in it than there should have been.
He found her in the training courtyard behind the villas, alone, the sky still black above the peak and only the faintest grey beginning to show at the eastern rim of the world. She had her bone staff in both hands, running through the Lumina forms — the ones the Silver Wood elders had drilled into her since childhood, gold light gathering along the staff's length in clean, practiced arcs. It wasn't a mask. It had never been a mask. It was simply the half of her that her family had decided, generations ago, was the only half worth cultivating.
She was three forms deep when her foot landed wrong.
