CHAPTER ONE – WAKE
Zephryn didn't speak as he stepped away from the window.
The floor creaked beneath him, but no one stirred.
Only the rain replied—soft, endless.
It was less a sound now, and more a presence.
A low, constant breath. Like the hum. Like the dream.
He moved carefully to the corner of the dorm where their cloaks hung, fingers brushing past Kaelen's leather strap and Yolti's scarf-threaded loop until he found his own—
damp from the last walk home, pulse-threaded at the seam where Solara had stitched it by hand.
He lifted it, then paused.
There, at the base of the wall, tucked behind the edge of a low chest, sat something small.
Blue.
Faintly glowing.
"Bubbalor…?"
No response.
But it was him.
Curled. Still. Eyes open.
The glyphs along his back flickered gently like fireflies beneath glass.
He wasn't asleep. Just… quiet.
And not in the way he had been before.
Zephryn knelt beside him.
"You didn't come back last night."
Still nothing.
Then—
a single, short hum.
Almost like a whisper. Not from his mouth, but from the marks on his skin.
A pulse—thin and searching—rose from his body, then settled again.
Zephryn pressed his palm gently against Bubbalor's forehead.
"I heard it again."
The glyph beneath Bubbalor's eye flared just once.
Then dimmed.
Zephryn exhaled and stood.
He wasn't going to push him.
Not today.
He wrapped the cloak over his shoulder, letting it hang loose as he crossed back to his bed.
The others still hadn't moved. Selka, especially, hadn't shifted once.
He stared at her back for a moment.
Still breathing, he thought.
But the way her body stayed—so still, so quiet—
it reminded him of the cliff.
Of how silence could feel like a closing door.
The rain hit the window harder now. Just a little.
No wind.
Just pressure.
Zephryn sat at the edge of the bed and looked down at the scarf in his hands.
He didn't know what to say to it.
So he folded it again, once more.
Tighter this time.
And waited.