Chapter 129: The Weight of Light
Peace, as it turned out, had its own burdens. The cove, once a bastion against the Unraveling, was now a place of pilgrimage. Scholars came to study the Great Schematic in Lyra's institute. Diplomats came to be tutored in the nuances of the Linua before important treaties. Seekers of all kinds arrived, drawn by the legend of the family who had helped mend the world's song.
Elara and Kaelen, in their late fifties, found themselves less the stewards of a sanctuary and more the curators of a museum of their own lives. They were revered, and reverence was a weight.
"I miss the days when the biggest problem was a clogged gutter," Kaelen grumbled one afternoon, after politely declining yet another request for a "strategic blessing" on a new settlement's perimeter wall. He stood at his workbench, not mending nets, but carving a delicate songbird from a piece of driftwood a hobby he'd taken up to quiet his still-strategic mind.
