The ridge in the floor smooths. The stone flows back to its original level, the Lithenmere smoothing the displacement with the same ease it sealed the passage behind us on the first night.
But the gold where the ridge ran stays bright for several seconds after the stone has healed. The mountain remembering what passed through it.
Veyran straightens. His mouth is a line.
But the rigid displeasure I have been reading since we arrived is gone. What replaces it is worse.
“Fascinating,” he says. Quiet. The word carrying no warmth and considerable precision.
His eyes move from the settling stone to my hands to my face. The institutional resistance is gone.
“Does King Lanthar know that you are on the opposing side of him?” I ask.
“I am on the side of his best interest and the interest of Thessivane.”
He inclines his head.
He walks away. The corridor seals behind him.
I look at my hands. The cup was a hairline. The table was a single line.
This was a ridge of displaced stone projected across six feet of floor at a specific target.
It is accelerating.
I still haven’t told Celeste.
I find Seraphina before she finds me. Or perhaps the Lithenmere arranges the meeting. The corridor opens toward the chamber where she briefed us on protocol, and she is already inside when I cross the threshold.
The stone seals at her gesture once I am in.
“Sit,” she says.
I sit. She stays standing.
“You’ve been carrying this since before Thessivane.”
She folds her arms.
“And what I just saw in the corridor tells me it’s past the point where you can afford to carry it alone.”
I say nothing. She needs no confirmation of what she watched happen.
“Your witch-dark ancestry has always run deeper than I initially assessed.”
She steps closer.
“What I unlocked three hundred years ago was the surface. The shadows. What’s moving through you now comes from beneath that.”
She pauses.
“What is it?”
“Telekinesis. Structural manipulation. The ability to read and reshape physical matter through directed force.”
She studies my hands.
“The same fundamental ability Celeste carries.”
