The sun had grown long in its descent, casting its burnished light across the high terraces of Aelthamar, where shadows fell not in lines, but in soft angles, like brushstrokes on a silvered scroll. The air held the perfume of late-spring bloom: drowsy violet, distant citron, and the faintest ache of fallen lilac. In the high courtyard of the western palace wing, named The Gallery of Green for its absence of columns, though lined with chiseled reliefs of vanished monarchs, the hour settled into silence. Not the silence of absence, but the soft hush of distance, where presence remains but draws no breath.

It was there, beneath the angled eaves of a rosewood arbor tangled in the first shivers of ivy, that Sian Yllarieth sat, half-in and half-out of the descending gold, his back to the world and his face to a book that lay open upon his lap like a confession.

Around him, the world stirred with quiet life, but not near. Across the courtyard, perhaps fifty paces away and wrapped in the brilliance of conversation and motion, his peers congregated in the center where polished stone met whiteleaf shade, laughter, sparring, whispered courtships that disguised themselves in teasing and mockery. There were sons of High Houses and daughters of silver-blooded lineages, those who wore their magic like perfume, those who bent the air with mere gesture. Their gowns caught the light, and their voices rose like wind-chimes caught in fervent breeze.

But Sian had chosen the periphery, as he always did, not from timidity, but from something far quieter. A kind of inward rhythm. A discipline of stillness.

The bench he occupied was carved from faded obsidian veined with old quartz, worn down in the center from centuries of use, though no one sat there now but him. A creeping fern, half-wild, had crept its way through a break in the wall beside him, its tendrils lacing themselves through the latticework like fingers reaching for silence. The vines leaned inward as if to see what he read, their green deepened to indigo beneath the dying light.

His robe that afternoon was woven from a threadwork of ash-blue, nearly gray in stillness, though when the breeze caught it, it shimmered faintly with the faintest embroidery of falling stars. The sleeves had been pushed to his elbows, evidence of long hours spent beneath this arbor, and his left hand rested lazily upon the open pages, two fingers curled beneath the spine, steadying it against the wind. His right hand moved sparingly, a thumb drawing circles along the margin where some ancient script bloomed in faded ink, lines traced not idly, but as if trying to decipher the pulse left behind in the writer’s hand.

Above him, the canopy of the arbor filtered the waning light into patterns across his skin, dappled shadows that moved as leaves shifted, painting him in ephemeral shapes: fractured constellations across his cheek, a tremble of gold across his collarbone. His hair, long and black as charred cedar, had come undone in places, slipping forward to frame his face where it caught the breeze like a banner abandoned mid-procession. He made no motion to correct it. He did not fidget, did not sigh, did not glance at the laughter across the courtyard. If he had heard them, it made no mark upon him.

His eyes, those mahogany-brown eyes, remained fixed to the book, though it could not be said that he read in the way others read. He did not devour, nor skim. He drank. Line by line, syllable by syllable, as if harvesting meaning that had been buried too long, too deeply, for the casual reader to unearth.

A lone petal drifted down, brushed by an invisible breeze from the upper balcony. It spiraled once, then again, and came to rest upon the page beside his thumb. He looked at it for a moment, neither moved it nor crushed it. Simply allowed it to remain. And then, after a pause, he turned the page softly, letting the petal shift like a breath upon the wind, its fate now between gravity and whim.