Act V, Chapter 25: The Ghost Watches in Absolute Silence

The fires in the harbor burned through the afternoon.

Aldric did not watch them. He was watching Mira's hands.

She had stopped copying documents hours ago — those hands that had worked with such precise economy through the small hours of the capital's last ordinary night, transcribing thirty years of buried truth onto paper small enough to fold into the hem of a dress. Now they lay open in her lap, the right one beneath his own, the left resting palm-upward as though waiting to receive something that had not yet arrived and perhaps would not. There was ink still in the crease of her thumb. She had not washed it away. Aldric thought she might not wash it away for some time. He recognized the impulse — not toward preservation exactly, but toward the refusal of convenience, the way a bruise is pressed because the pain is at least a legible language.