Four hours until moonrise and I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't do anything except pace the length of Kael's room while my brain ran through every possible way this could go catastrophically wrong.
Spoiler: there were a lot of ways.
The bonds were chaos — Kael's steady determination bleeding into Riven's quiet confidence bleeding into Draven's controlled precision bleeding into Thorne's feral readiness — and I couldn't filter any of it, just absorbed all four like emotional feedback that made my chest tight.
"You're going to wear a hole in the floor." Draven's voice cut through my spiral and I looked up to find all four of them in the room, which I absolutely hadn't noticed happening because apparently anxiety made me oblivious.
"When did you—" I couldn't finish.
"Five minutes ago." Riven closed the door behind them. "You were too busy panicking to notice."
Fair.
"I'm not panicking, I'm preparing." My hands were shaking and I shoved them behind my back.
