~LYRA'S POV~
The field went quiet.
Not fully, behind us and on the flanks, the battle still moved, still breathed, still had sound. But in the immediate clearing, in the space between me and Selara with her army frozen around her, something had shifted into a different register entirely. The kind of quiet that existed between two things deciding what they were going to do next.
Selara looked at me across the stillness.
The performance was gone. I could see it clearly now, the composed pleasantness, the calculated warmth, the almost-kindness she'd brought to every word she'd spoken since she walked out of the tree line. All of it stripped back. What was underneath wasn't monstrous exactly. It was older than monstrous. It was centuries of wanting something specific and finally being twenty feet away from it, and the wanting had its own particular look that didn't bother with disguise anymore.
Ancient hunger. That was what was looking at me.
