Chapter 27
Chapter 27 — The Weight of Absence
Kayline and Aldren wake in telepathic pain where Mireth's thoughts should be. They discover Mireth in a deep sleep coma, her pregnancy advanced to six months overnight, and realize the unborn child is a girl who can speak through Mireth's body. The child identifies herself as healthy but acknowledges she is hurting them by accelerating growth. Kayline experiences physical pain in her own body — no room, as if the house itself has run out of space for what is growing. With one night remaining before the dark moon, the group must confront the impossibility of their situation: a child growing too fast, a mother trapped in sleep, and an entity in the northeast that has been asking questions about creation it cannot calculate.
The morning arrived the way bad news does — without permission.
Kayline opened her eyes and knew something was wrong before she'd finished waking. The channel was there, wide open, humming with the low-grade static that had become the background frequency of her existence since the ritual. Aldren's thoughts sat at the edges of hers like furniture in a familiar room — steady, angular, reliable in ways she could not afford to take for granted. But where Mireth should have been, where the warm golden current of the healer's dreaming mind usually braided through theirs like thread through warp, there was —
Pain.
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