The pressure in the air did not disappear, even after I forced myself to take a slow breath.
It lingered, stretched thin but unbroken, like something invisible had settled around us and refused to dissolve simply because the moment had passed. The city still existed beyond that space, still filled with movement and distant sound, but none of it reached us in the same way anymore. It felt as though we had stepped outside of it without moving, as if everything that mattered had narrowed down to the three of us standing there.
I could still feel it inside me.
Not as a surge this time, not as something wild or uncontrollable, but as a steady presence that had settled beneath my skin and refused to leave. It didn't push. It didn't demand. It simply existed, and somehow that made it more unsettling than the chaos that had come before.
Rowan noticed the shift before I said anything.
