He was eight years old, and he was terrifyingly small.
The memory wasn't his, but it bled through their connection with absolute clarity. It was midmorning in the sprawling, cavernous main hall of the Sol estate. Valerica, at eight years old, carried a vastly different gravity than the imposing woman he knew now. The Celestial Heart had not yet been formally named or violently disciplined; it simply ran through her juvenile mana channels at a raw, unmitigated level, humming long before anyone had given her the language to understand what it was.
Across the hall, another child from a visiting family was wandering through the grand space with the unconscious, drifting ease of a child who knew she was welcomed.
Vane felt it happen from the inside out.
