Chapter 60. The Thing That Watches

They returned in silence.

The wind had died again, but it didn’t feel like stillness. It felt like a held breath—a waiting. The kind of silence that presses against your skull like deep water, where every heartbeat sounds too loud.

Nerin lit no fire that evening.

“I don’t like the way the smoke rises when it’s watching,” she said simply, setting a heavy iron bar across the door.

Adria didn’t ask who it was.

She already knew.

They sat in the central chamber, cloaks wrapped close, each facing a different direction. The tower was dark but not blind—thin lines of pale moonlight drifted through the cracks above, painting the space in broken geometry.

For a long while, there was no sound.

Then something shifted.

Not a knock. Not a crash.

A displacement.

Like air curling the wrong way around an invisible shape.

Adria stood slowly.

Nerin didn’t stop her.

She moved to the window slit and peered out.

At