The Reliquary was cold at the second hour of the night.
Not the ordinary cold of an empty building, but the deep, settled cold of stone that had never fully forgotten it was underground. It lived in the walls, in the shelving, in the glass of the cases themselves. It waited for summer the way buried things waited for light.
Liora sat on the floor with her back against the shelving unit beside Case Fourteen.
Her hand was pressed flat against the glass.
She kept it there until the warmth of her walk down the corridor faded from her skin and stopped interfering with what she needed to feel.
Three weeks ago, she had stood in this exact place at first light.
She had noted the warmth then as a condition.
An anomaly.
A discrepancy in expected preservation temperature.
Something to be recorded, explained, and resolved.
Now she understood that version of herself as incomplete.
Not wrong.
Just early.
