Time was a strange, fluid thing in the palace of Sidera.
It stretched and contracted, a rubber band of moments that sometimes felt endless and other times slipped through her fingers like water.
The days since the attack, since the failed assassination attempt, had passed in a haze of healing and waiting. The scar on her neck had faded to a thin, silvery line, a whisper of the violence that had been inflicted upon her.
She was, by all accounts, healed. The medic had given his approval, his gruff nod a clear sign that she was no longer his patient, no longer a fragile thing to be coddled and protected.
At least not officially. Publicly.
But the guards still lingered outside her door, a constant, silent reminder that she was not truly free, that the danger had not passed, that she was still a pawn in a game she couldn't begin to understand, even after having read the book on it in a literal sense.
