Month three inside the Temple, and Aelara had stopped counting days.
She noticed the absence of it on a morning when Caius woke up and immediately began explaining something very serious to the wall beside his sleeping mat, and she lay there for ten full minutes just listening to him before she got up, and at no point in those ten minutes did her brain produce the automatic inventory of how many days inside, how many months outside, how much time had passed and how much remained and how many things were unsolved.
She just listened to her son have a conversation with a wall and felt, quietly, like a person who had put something down.
