The letter arrived on a Thursday.
It came through the Temple's formal channel, which was different from the way most things arrived at the Citadel, a specific kind of envelope with a specific seal that Aelara had seen only a handful of times in her life but recognized immediately when she saw it on the table in the entrance hall.
She picked it up and looked at it for a moment before she opened it.
She did not know exactly what she expected. News from the Temple came rarely and when it came it was usually practical, updates on the ward's status, the rotation of the people maintaining it, the quiet institutional language of a place that had been doing the same necessary work for so long that it had developed its own particular way of speaking about it.
She opened it standing in the corridor outside the dining room.
