Fin watched it happen from the outside.
The wind shifted.
He watched the scent reach Lucian the way a wave reaches shore, the wind carrying it across the courtyard, up the aisle, past the white flowers and the two hundred faces and the officiant with his heavy robes, delivering it directly into the lungs of a man who was the last person this was supposed to happen to.
He breathed through his nose.
Once. That was all it took. One inhale through the wrong passage at the wrong second on the wrong day.
Fin watched himself break.
The breaking was invisible. That was the thing about Lucian Moon and about Finnick Shadowclaw and about every version of the man whose soul wore these faces: the breaking happened inside, behind composure that was load-bearing, beneath a surface that held because the holding was a skill he had been perfecting since he was eight years old and standing in a borrowed corridor being told his parents were dead.
