The room was theirs.
Not borrowed. Not temporary. Not a room they were passing through on the way to something else. Their room, in their home, at the end of a day that had been many things and was now, finally, only this.
Aelara stood at the window.
The city below was doing its night things, small lights moving through the dark, the steady ordinary rhythm of a place that did not know or need to know what had happened today in a quiet ceremony with four people and a registrar and the specific weight of two people saying the thing they had already known to be true for a long time out loud and making it official.
She had not cried. She had thought she might. She had watched Lyra cry, discreetly, exactly as Caelum had predicted, and had felt something so large move through her own chest that it had gone past tears entirely and arrived somewhere quieter on the other side.
She heard Vaelor come out of the adjoining room.
