Verret’s Pov

I stood by the high window and watched the courtyard fold itself into twilight, the last of the day’s heat bleeding slow and red into the stones. For twenty years I had walked this world like a man with his feet in the sea: always wet with searching, always salt-stung with disappointment. Tonight the wind tasted different, thick with possibility, heavy with the scent of fate.

I could not believe it. The discovery did not arrive with a trumpet or a herald; it arrived instead like a small, insolent footstep at my door.

After two decades of threadbare hope, after rites that ate my years and bargains that...