Sekar's whole world narrowed to her daughter's face, that gray, fixed, wrong-colored stare replacing the warm brown eyes she'd looked into every day since the girl was born, and for one paralyzing second she couldn't make her own body move at all. The corridor's ordinary sounds, the distant clatter of the kitchens below, a guard's footsteps somewhere on the level above, all of it seemed to recede behind a thin ringing silence that hadn't been there a moment before, as though the very air around them had drawn back to make room for something enormous.
She had seen her daughter channel the shrine entity twice now, had watched her go still and distant and speak with a calm too old for her years, but this was nothing like that familiar unsettling stillness. This felt colder, heavier, a presence that filled the small body in front of her the way water fills a cup rather than settling gently alongside what was already there.
