After parting ways with Ayaka and Akane at the corridor's junction, Nathan walked through the castle's nighttime interior alone, the torchlight casting long amber intervals between stretches of cool shadow.
The hour was late enough that even the castle's more diligent inhabitants had retired. Distant footsteps marked a guard completing his routine round somewhere two floors above. Otherwise the building breathed quietly around him, settled into the particular stillness that large stone structures accumulated in darkness.
Nathan walked without hurry, his thoughts moving through the day's accumulated information with the methodical patience he applied to things that needed proper arrangement rather than immediate resolution.
