~LYRA'S POV~
It happened three days after Ashfen, and I wasn't asleep when it did.
That was the part I couldn't stop returning to afterward, the fact that it hadn't come in a dream, hadn't surfaced during training or a moment of physical stress.
I was awake. I was sitting at my desk with the lamp burning low and a document from Mira's compiled research in my hands, reading about Selara's original exile with the specific focus of someone trying to build a complete picture before a deadline they couldn't precisely identify.
One moment I was holding the page.
The next, I wasn't anywhere I recognised.
The space was grey and still. Not dark, there was light, but it came from no direction, diffused through everything and originating nowhere, the kind of light that existed in a place that didn't have a sun. It wasn't frightening exactly. It was the particular wrongness of a space that operated by different rules than any space I'd been in before.
Selara was there.
