Aria felt Selene die.
She felt it the way she had felt the battle begin through the seal, through the hum of the kingdom that had grown outward in her chest over the past weeks. She felt the held breath of Ashenveil break into violence. She felt the violence move and crest and end. And she felt, at the centre of it, a cold bright thing that had been pulling at the edge of the kingdom's awareness for two years simply stop.
Selene had been a presence at the edge of the seal's awareness since the day Aria had taken it. Not a loud presence. A thread. A cold thread pulling somewhere to the south, the same thread Senna had felt three weeks before the journey, the thread of a binder working at the kingdom from a distance.
The thread snapped.
Aria felt it snap.
She sat up in the dark lower ro
