By the time the afternoon light began to turn golden against the stone, I had stopped trying to measure time by anything familiar.
There were no shifting pack sounds here, no routines I recognized, no changing rhythm of forest life to tell me when the day had moved from one hour into the next. There was only the enclosed stillness of the place Kael had taken me to, broken now and then by the scrape of his boots against stone, the quiet movement of air through narrow openings in the walls, and the constant, unwelcome knowledge that I was not where I had chosen to be.
And yet, beneath all of that, something else remained.
The moon.
Not visible now, not this early in the day, but present all the same, like a thread that had been tied somewhere beneath my skin and left there to remind me that what had started could no longer be forced back into silence.
