The next few weeks passed without anything major happening, or so everyone said. In Ravenholt, quiet had a way of sounding like a truce you hadn't signed. People still queued for stew, still traded candle-ends and cartridges in the courtyard, still laughed too loudly at night as if to bully the dark back into its corners. The walls held. The gates opened at dawn and shut at dusk. The ferals howled beyond bowshot and did not test the stones.
Elara tried to believe it. She tried to let routine wash her clean.
Each morning she woke to the same thin light through the arrow slits, to the scrape of boots along the corridor, to the clatter of weapons being checked two floors below. Luke rose before her and folded his blanket into a neat square, silent as a prayer. Caleb brought bread when he could spare it, a mug of something warm when he couldn't, kisses when no one was looking. Torvee argued cheerfully with anyone in range. Corin practised until her shoulders shook, then muttered about fletching and did it all again.
On the surface, it was life.
Under it, other things woke.
At first the auras came like tricks of the light—flashes at the edge of Elara's vision she could blink away if she wanted badly enough. She stopped wanting to. Corin's green shimmer became a familiar comfort, a haze of living light that wove itself about the fae girl's shoulders whenever she laughed and tightened like braided ivy when she drew a bow. Torvee's blue was a mood ring no one else could see: restless ripples when she was bored, a bright running stream when she was happy, pale broken eddies when she was angry enough to punch a door.
It wasn't only them.
In the yard where the cooks ladled oats into bowls, Elara watched green thread itself through people she'd known for years—Anya the washerwoman with a faint leaf-hum about her hair; grey-bearded Wren who mended boots, his hands haloed by a soft, steady moss-light; the shy lad who turned spits in the kitchen, his glow weak as seedlings and just as hopeful. They carried pails and firewood and gossip and had no idea the air around them betrayed them to eyes now awake. Humans had always been more complicated than their stories; apparently, so had the fae.
She kept Luke's warning close: Don't let on what you see.
Elara didn't speak to anyone about the colours. She didn't say that the green came in grades, that some people shone with bright woven bands like vines after rain while others kept only a delicate tint, as if they had grown up on the shadowed side of the wood. She didn't admit how the sight of it made her feel—comforted, yes, because the world wasn't only teeth, but also lonelier, because nothing looked the same and she alone knew it.
Caleb noticed something was off and mistook it for distance. He watched her too closely and not closely enough. He would kiss her and say, "You're a thousand miles away," and she would kiss him back and think, I'm standing in the same room as you, and I can smell the forest in people's bones. She wished she could give him the sight for a minute and then take it back before it changed him; she knew that wasn't how anything worked.
Some evenings she and Caleb slipped to the walkway above the gate to watch the last light spill into the hollow below the hill. The fields beyond were scrub now, furrowed by desperate planting and stripped by more desperate raiders years ago. On clear nights, you could see the line where the old road cut away to the east like a scar. They shared a blanket and let their legs dangle through a crenel. Caleb talked about practical things: the wall mortar crumbling, the grain stock down a barrel, the way Old Sergeant Tams had started drilling with a limp. Elara listened and nodded and did not say she saw a faint green thread about Tams now, where once she had seen nothing at all.
When the howls came, they came faint and far. Elara stood and counted them with the rest and watched the archers do their ritual of checking bowstrings with a little slap and a little kiss. Yellow never crossed the wall. She dreamed of it anyway—broken, twitching yellow—and woke with her mouth dry.
Luke was a fixed point in those days. He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once: at the edge of the training yard like a shadow; on the stair when she thought she was alone; leaning against the parapet with his arms folded, eyes set on the woods as if reading secrets on bark. He didn't hover so much as occupy every gap danger could use. There was nothing he did that was wasted. When Torvee bristled at him for standing in the doorway like a door, he offered her a look that wasn't quite a smile and moved half a step aside, which changed nothing and made Torvee grin anyway. When Corin's fingers bled from drawing until the skin split, he said, "Stop," and Corin said, "Not yet," and he tipped his chin as if that was the correct answer and simply stood there until she had finished and then pressed a clean rag into her hand.
He never once asked Elara what she saw. He didn't need to. Every time her gaze lingered too long on someone's edge, he cleared his throat, soft as a warning bell, and she remembered herself.
Days blurred into one another. Routine has its own music. Elara cleaned her blade. She mended a sleeve. She tried to help in the kitchens and got thrown out for cutting vegetables too slowly because she kept staring at the steam around the pots, convinced some pattern would reveal itself in the green there. She fetched water and noticed that the older shifter woman who kept to herself in the laundry had a blue heart to her aura that ran deep and steady, nothing like Torvee's bright skitter. She held a crying child and saw nothing at all around him and was unexpectedly grateful. She held a dying ferret for a boy to say goodbye to and the world fuzzed with silver at the edges until she breathed through it.
At night, she lay awake and tried to catalogue the rules. Humans: blank, honest, breakable. Fae: green in threads and ropes and banners, stronger in those who had learned how to listen to the old things. Shifters: blue in flows and eddies, fickle but not foolish. Wolves: she hadn't seen many, and she realised she had only Luke to look at—he gave off no halo she could quantify, only that sense of held gold she could not pin down unless she looked sideways at him in torchlight. Vampires: she had not seen violet since the pair of eyes that day by the wall. She half hoped she never would. She half knew that hope was a child's hope, one you pat on the head and let run in circles while the grown work gets done.
When she slept, the dream sometimes came back, but it came in fragments now: the thick pool edging under the door; the bitten woman's breath turning into a growl; a hand on her cheek she could still feel after she woke. Once she dreamed her own silver made a net across the doorway that nothing could cross without asking, and she woke smiling for no good reason.
Caleb grew strange with her. Not cruel. Not cold. Just different. He had always been safe in her body; now he wanted to be safe in her mind and didn't know how. Twice he asked, "What changed?" as if expecting her to point to a hinge in the day and say there. The first time she blamed the seasons. The second time she said, "I'm tired," which was true, false, and insufficient all at once. He looked at her as if memorising her from a distance. She hated the distance and kept building it.
Torvee, who was allergic to distance, kept flinging herself into the gap. "Come with me," she would say, hauling Elara to the yard where she'd chalked a line on the flagstones for a handstand game she'd invented with some of the younger lads. Torvee's laughter turned her blue bright enough to light the wall. Elara joined in, if only to feel normal. She wasn't very good at handstands. Torvee was. Torvee fell anyway just to make the lads braver. Elara loved her for that and told her so. Torvee pretended not to cry.
Corin watched everything and said little, which was her way. Every now and then, the green about her would flare bright as spring after a long winter. Elara asked her once what she was thinking when it did, and Corin said, "I don't know," and looked at her hands as if they might answer better.
On a quiet afternoon when the sun had the nerve to look warm, Elara went down to the well with two pails and found Luke already there, one hand on the rope, the other braced against the stone. A faint gold hung about him then, not a shine but a pressure the air made around his shape.
"You're watching for something," she said, testing the words.
"I'm always watching for something," he replied, because of course he would.
She hesitated. "Do you feel it? The stillness? Like the world has stopped breathing to see if we notice."
He passed her a full pail. "Calm before a storm is still wind," he said. "This feels like the tide drawing back."
"And what does that mean?"
"That it will come in again. All at once."
She swallowed. "Soon?"
He didn't answer. He didn't have to. The rope creaked. Somewhere far along the wall a guard laughed too loud at a joke.
The days kept their rhythm anyway. The commanders drilled the gate crews on faster braces. A seamstress traded a length of good linen for a pair of boots and called it fair. A child lost a tooth and paraded it tied on a string about his neck like a medal. Elara watched the green move through the keep and imagined the roots of the old world quietly taking hold.
On the last evening before anything changed, Caleb found her under the walkway where the stones still held a bit of heat from the day. The light had gone the colour of old honey. He leaned against the wall and said, "Come away with me tomorrow. Just for an hour. Out past the lower field. I've a rabbit snare out there. We could—" He caught himself, hearing how foolish it sounded to ask for a walk beyond the walls like they were courting in a village that still had dances.
"We could," she said, because she wanted to want the simple thing. "If the captain will sign us out."
He nodded. Relief softened him. He pressed his forehead to hers and breathed like that for a while, a small, private thing that felt more honest than words. "I miss you," he said into her hair.
"I'm right here," she answered, and they both knew it wasn't the answer he wanted.
They were parting when she felt it.
Not a sound. Not a sight. A pressure at the edges of her vision, not like silver rising or green weaving or blue running, but something warmer, heavier, older. She didn't see a glow; she sensed its promise the way you sense lightning before you hear the thunder— the prickle, the hush, the way the hairs along your arm stand to attention as if awaiting orders.
Elara turned toward the gate without meaning to.
"What is it?" Caleb asked.
She shook her head, trying to look casual and failing. "Nothing. Thought I heard the bell." There had been no bell. The guards on the walkway leaned and chatted and lifted their mugs. Nothing moved.
Luke appeared on the steps a moment later, having done that thing where he arrived at a place he'd already decided to be. His eyes flicked from Elara to the gate and back. He stood like a wedge driven into wood, subtle and unstoppable both.
"Something?" he asked. He didn't look at Caleb when he said it. He looked at her.
"I don't know," she said, which was the truth and not enough.
That night, Elara lay awake a long time. She traced the ceiling lines with her eyes. She made promises in her head that she did not say aloud. She did not dream of the bunker. She did not feel Riven's hand on her cheek. When sleep took her, it took her all at once, as if it had been waiting for permission.
Dawn prised the keep open with chill fingers. The usual noises rose and fell. People queued for stew. Someone cursed about a broken hinge. A pigeon made a ridiculous show of being a survivor.
Near noon, the bell at the gate rang twice—once for travellers, once for caution.
Elara was already on her feet before the second note faded, heart stepping into a faster beat. She did not see gold yet. She only felt the tide change.
Two figures stood beyond the bars when she reached the parapet: a tall man and a shorter woman, road-dust on their boots, cloaks plain, faces turned up without fear. They wore the kind of stillness people mistake for peace.
"Wanderers," a guard muttered, squinting through the grille.
"Shelter," the man called, voice carrying easily. "We can pay our keep."
Elara's breath snagged. She didn't need to see the gold to know it was there, waiting to burn when she let it. Luke's hand brushed the stone beside her, a warning and an answer both.
Caleb arrived a heartbeat later, eyes going to Elara's face before the yard. "Who are they?"
She swallowed. "Wanderers," she said, as if names were ever that simple.
The gate captain shouted down for them to state their business. The woman answered this time, voice warm and low. Elara decided not to look properly yet. She knew what she would see if she did. She wasn't ready to endure it on an empty stomach.
Calm held. The storm hadn't broken. Not yet.
But the tide was already running in.