The Gathering of Fire
What pulls me back is never power—it’s her.
Lucien
I hadn’t planned to stay.
Not in the building. Not in the same stretch of silence that cradled her too close to memory. There were too many echoes here. Too many things I hadn’t said that I had tried to bury in the floorboards between us.
But I couldn’t make myself leave.
I’d claimed a room on the upper floor—a skeleton of a space with scorched wallpaper curling at the corners, but the door still locked, and the windows faced east. From there, I kept watch. Let the city bleed its quiet agony beneath me.
Below, I heard her.
The gentle groan of the flooring as she shifted her weight across the boards. The low rustle of paper and pages in a book, probably. Her breath was shallow but steady, but she barely slept,
