POV: Lyra
She watches Kai fall and feels her own mortality.
I've seen people get hurt on this journey. I've seen wolves take damage that would have ended a human in the first exchange and keep moving, the supernatural recovery doing its work in real time, the biology of them fundamentally different from mine in ways that I've had to recalibrate my understanding of danger around repeatedly. I've stopped using my own body as the reference point for what's survivable. The reference point for wolves is not my reference point and treating it like it is gets people killed.
What the King does to Kai is not something I recalibrate.
