Chapter 132

Aria's POV

Summer arrived and the third institute residency ended.

Beth came back to Shadow Peak in July with the final cohort documentation and the particular quality she'd developed after each residency — not tired exactly, more like someone who had been fully used in the right way. The satisfaction of sustained purpose.

We sat in the kitchen on a Tuesday morning and she talked without notes, which was how she processed what had just happened before she wrote anything about it.

"The mechanism is visible now," she said. "In ways it wasn't in the first two residencies."

"What mechanism specifically?"

"How practitioners change." She held her tea....