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Korvel escorting her.
He went completely still.
The storm beyond the corridor seemed to disappear as his heart picked up in pace and threatened to explode from his chest. All he could picture was another man touching her waist during a dance beneath crystalline observatory light.
Another man standing beside her within those impossible towers.
Another man watching her laugh. Watching her smile.
For Caelyn, there had never been anyone else.
It wasn't because he had spent those turnings waiting for a promise Elowynn had never made him. She hadn't owed him one, and he had never expected her to return his feelings. He had just never wanted anyone the way he wanted her.
There had been opportunities, certainly. Moments when loneliness might have made accepting someone's attention easier than returning to an empty room. But every time, he had known it would be exactly that: an attempt to fill a space that belonged to someone else.
So, he had waited.
Perhaps that made him foolish. Five turnings was a long time to carry feelings for someone who might never feel the same. But he didn’t care. His heart belonged to only one person.
Caelyn turned his attention back to the words on the parchment, reading them again.
They suggested something he had never allowed himself to even consider. Something that sounded like more than fleeting fascination.
This sounded like… courtship.
He gripped the parchment hard, crinkling it.
Shards of crystal and jagged metal tore across Caelyn’s skin while blue-white light cracked in violent waves along the chamber wall. Caelyn staggered backward as shattered astrylite exploded across the stone, and the entire corridor plunged into flickering darkness.
Somewhere overhead, Sisters screamed.
Caelyn stared at the ruined conduit, breathing hard.
The fractured astrylite embedded within the wall hissed with unstable resonance while cold spread outward through the stone beneath his boots.
No, not just cold. Frost.
Caelyn stepped back, staring down at it with enraged eyes, his pulse thundering painfully beneath his ribs.
No, no, no—
He breathed. He breathed, and he breathed.
The frost stopped a few paces from his feet and silence, save for the thunder and crashing waves below, filled the corridor.
Caelyn looked down at his trembling hands, his anger visible.
And it was not easing.
Every terrible thought he had spent six turnings refusing to acknowledge forced their way to the surface all at once.
Korvel Thorne was in Veylspire.
Korvel Thorne danced with her.
Touched her.
Did they kiss? Did she love him?
