The silence that returned after Damon released the quarantine bubble was not the same as before. It was thin, strained, filled with the ghost of screams—both the P'nath's psychic death rattle and the Silent Teacher's frustrated, muffled rage. They had materialized back in the Spire's mediation chamber, the air still crackling with the aftershock of severed reality.
The mission had been a success, if success could be measured in pyrrhic terms. The P'nath swarm was saved. Seraphina and Luna, working in a desperate, harmonious tandem, had woven the fractured consciousness back together, their combined light a scalpel and a balm. But the entire time, Seraphina had felt the entity within Luna pushing, testing the boundaries of Damon's bubble, trying to find a crack to slip its poison through. It was like performing delicate surgery while a venomous spider sat on the surgeon's hand.
