The twins were six years old and the Temple had run out of things to teach them in safety.
Aelara understood this before Seraphine said it. She had been watching it happen over the preceding weeks the way the training sessions had changed quality, the way Caelum's power now moved through the Temple's currents not like a student learning to swim but like a current encountering another current, two things of equal weight meeting and having to negotiate.
The way Lyra's truth-sense had expanded past the walls themselves, past the people inside them, into something that Seraphine described carefully as ambient an awareness that was no longer limited to the people directly around her but was beginning to extend outward in ways that the Temple's boundaries could no longer contain or calibrate.
The Temple had been a container. For three years of its time, eight months of the outside world's, it had been the right container. Now it was too small.
