The shock had been a violent, tectonic thing, but as I stood in the waist-deep warmth of the sanctuary, it began to recede, leaving behind something far heavier.
It was a quiet, suffocating grief that settled into my bones like silt at the bottom of a lake.
All at once, the weight of twenty-seven years of a life that felt like a lie descended upon me. Every unanswered question, every moment I had felt like a jagged piece of a puzzle that didn't fit, finally had a name.
I thought of my mother's face... the woman who had raised me in the hidden walls of that palace.
I remembered the way she looked at me when I caught a rat I had frozen solid with a touch, or the way she'd flinch when my eyes caught the light in the dark.
It hadn't just been love in those eyes. It was fear. A deep, primal terror of the thing she had brought into the world but could not understand.
