The room was exactly as I had left it.
That simple fact was the most disorienting thing of all. The same elegant escritoire, its surface still scattered with notes on magical theory that now seemed absurdly trivial. The same wardrobe, its doors closed on dresses I had worn in a different life, before the darkness and the light and the fall. The same window, offering the same view of manicured gardens and distant spires, untouched by the catastrophe that had reshaped the world beneath them.
