Rama was on his feet before the frost finished spreading across the window glass, sword already in hand, motioning Sekar back toward the inner room where their daughter had just been settled onto her cot half asleep again after a long, exhausting day.
"Stay with her," he said, low and even. "Whatever this is, I want you both behind a wall, not beside me."
The crackling grew louder, spreading now along the wooden frame itself, and Rama crossed to the window with his blade raised, expecting cold and finding something stranger instead. The frost was not advancing the way it had at Girah Post or Sokawera, not creeping outward in patient hunger. It pulsed instead, rhythmic and deliberate, contracting and expanding in a pattern too regular to be anything born of grief or appetite.
