Nyx felt it three days later.
It was not the sort of thing she could have explained to someone who hadn't spent weeks listening to Vaelkirk breathe beneath the war.
She simply noticed that the wrongness had changed.
The same faint distortion she'd sensed beyond Ossara—the subtle pressure that had seemed to live beneath the land itself—had shifted again. Only slightly. Not enough to alarm anyone who hadn't learned to listen for it.
But Nyx had.
She stopped halfway through a conversation and turned her head toward the valley.
"It's not a threat."
The others looked at her.
"It's not getting worse, either." She frowned, listening to something none of them could hear. "If anything... it's settling."
Valerica folded her arms.
"Settling?"
"I don't know why yet."
Nyx closed her eyes for another moment.
The sensation was there.
But quieter.
Less jagged.
Whatever had been tightening around Vaelkirk seemed, for the moment, to have loosened its grip.
