Aether spent the first morning of his true recovery simply being still.
He had not planned it that way. He woke early, before even the birds had fully begun their chorus, and rather than reaching immediately for his clothes or calling out for Liora, he lay quietly in bed and let the pale gray light of dawn fill the room by slow degrees. He watched the ceiling beams darken and then lighten again as the sun climbed, watched the shadows cast by the window shift their angle minute by minute, and found himself grateful, in a way he had never quite felt before, for the simple, unhurried honesty of ordinary time passing.
