Chapter 29: What Vael Gives Back and What He Keeps

The shadow moved in a straight line.

That was the thing Callum noticed first, in the fractured second before everything else began happening: Vael's shadow on the dining hall floor, which had been sliding toward him at its slow and patient angle, simply corrected. As if something had released a tension held for longer than Callum had been alive. The shadow fell where it should have fallen, at the angle that physics and morning light through the eastern windows demanded, no more and no less. Vael did not appear to notice. Or he noticed, and his face was the same smooth and courteous surface it had always been, and Callum could not tell the difference, which was itself a kind of answer.

The dining hall was doing something Callum had no immediate category for.