The curse lifted at dawn.
Elara felt it before she saw it — the specific shift in the quality of the air in the room, the same way she felt presences and changes and the movement of things that did not announce themselves through ordinary channels. Something released. Something that had been coiled and deliberate and deeply embedded in the person lying on the floor of their chambers unwound itself with the slow completeness of a thing being undone at its root rather than its surface.
She looked at Kaelis.
The black veins were receding.
Not quickly. Not dramatically. The way tide went out — gradually, with the specific patience of something reversing a process that had taken a long time to build and was not going to be dismantled in an instant regardless of what anyone in the room felt about the timeline. From his face first, the lines thinning and fading, the specific wrongness of that color leaving his skin and returning it to what it was supposed to be.
