She woke early and lay still for a while.
Not thinking about anything in particular. Just in the early dark with her eyes open, listening to the house. Vaelor's breathing beside her, even and slow. The particular silence of a house in the last hour before it woke, the held quality of it, the stillness that was not empty but full of the people sleeping in it.
She did not get up immediately.
She lay there and listened.
She had been doing this more often recently, choosing to stay in the moment before the moment became something else. Not because something else was bad. Because the moment before was its own thing and she had spent too many years moving through it too quickly toward whatever came next, and she was practicing not doing that.
She listened to the house.
Somewhere above, the faint sound of Caelum turning over, which she could identify from two floors down after years of listening to it, the specific sound of a light sleeper adjusting without waking. Then quiet again.
