For a long while after the veil mended, the world felt quiet again.
The streets of the city glittered as they always had, rain pooling like spilled stars on the pavement. Children played, people hurried to work, and the hum of life filled every corner — but hidden between it all was something new. A pulse. A shimmer. A whisper of magic that hummed beneath the skin of the world.
Aisha could feel it.
It lived in the streetlights when they flickered near her hand. It rippled in her tea when she laughed. It sighed in the wind whenever Kael brushed her hair back with a smile that glowed faintly in the dark.
They'd made a home in her small apartment — now larger somehow, though no wall had moved. Kael said the "threads between spaces" had softened around them. Sometimes they woke to birds that glowed faintly silver, or rain that fell upward for a heartbeat before remembering gravity.
Life had become strange and beautiful.
But peace never lasts, not when magic breathes again.
