NEVA POV
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I didn't sleep well.
This wasn't a crisis — I'd stopped sleeping well before anything important a long time ago, and this was important enough that poor sleep felt like the most accurate possible response. I lay in the dark and I thought about the convening the way you think about something that's been approaching for long enough that it's become almost abstract, the way you think about a horizon you've been walking toward for weeks that is, tomorrow, going to stop being a horizon and start being a place you're actually standing in.
Ryke was asleep.
I knew this because his breathing had settled into the specific rhythm that meant he'd finally let the day go — the rhythm I'd learned in the weeks since the bond, the one that had become, without my noticing the exact moment
