🔹THORNE
The one seeing eye of my grandmother flickered with pain before she snuffed it out and spoke, her voice low. "I can never forget."
"It seems you have," Zeta Riven countered. "Because now the same moon, the same fates, have threaded a tether between Thorne and a woman who will be his damnation."
"Yet you defend her at every turn," Zeta Lysandra spat. "Now, one of us lies in a coma he might never wake from."
Still, my grandmother spoke up. "Kael's fate was never in the hands of some abused girl. She can barely lift herself without someone trampling her underfoot."
"Then explain the letter," Lysandra pressed. "Explain the evidence. Explain why the animals obey her like some forest wraith."
"Perhaps," Alice said quietly, her milky eye turning toward Lysandra with unnerving precision, "because she is what you fear most."
The room stilled.
"Neither a spy," Alice continued, "nor a weapon. She is a mirror."
"A mirror?" Riven scoffed.
"Of Seraphina," Alice said simply.
