After that, Devansh did not leave her alone.
Not deliberately.
Not protectively.
But consistently.
They walked the upper terraces together, silence threading between them like something shared rather than imposed. Ira felt the city differently now. Not as a weight—but as layered presences.
And she felt him differently too.
The centuries in him no longer struck her as a single, overwhelming mass.
They separated.
Strata of time.
Memory without feeling.
Feeling without memory.
She stopped suddenly.
Devansh turned back. "What is it?"
She hesitated.
"May I… try something?"
He studied her. "Define 'try.'"
She exhaled softly. "I want to touch you. Not the way I did before."
Silence tightened.
Devansh's instinct was to refuse.
Contact had only ever meant consequence.
But something in the way she stood—steady, not reaching, not asking to be saved—disrupted that instinct.
"Explain," he said.
"I don't want to take," she said quietly. "I want to… listen."
His jaw tightened.
"You already do."
"No," she replied. "I survive it. That's not the same."
She stepped closer, slow enough that he could stop her.
He did not.
When her fingers brushed his wrist, the familiar surge did not come.
Instead, the weight in her chest shifted.
Not inward.
Toward him.
She closed her eyes.
She did not brace.
She aligned.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Then—something tore.
Not in her.
In the silence around him.
Devansh's breath caught.
It was not pain.
It was not memory.
It was… response.
A sharp, unfamiliar constriction in his chest.
A pull.
A presence.
He staggered back half a step.
"What did you do?" he asked, voice no longer perfectly even.
Ira's eyes flew open. "You felt something."
He did not answer immediately.
Because answering would require naming it.
And naming it would require admitting it existed.
"I felt," he said finally, "disturbance."
She shook her head slowly. "No. You felt… orientation."
His gaze snapped to hers.
"You don't know what that means."
"I do," she said softly. "It means something inside you recognized something outside you."
Silence held.
Devansh looked down at his hand.
For the first time in centuries, it did not feel like an instrument.
It felt… situated.
He lifted his eyes to her.
And in the space where emotion had never lived, something precarious took shape.
Not love.
Not yet.
But the frightening possibility of it.
Ira stepped back, heart pounding.
"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I didn't mean to—"
He shook his head once.
"No," he said quietly. "Do it again."
Her breath stilled.
"Devansh…"
"If this is what change feels like," he continued, eyes fixed on hers, "then I will not meet it blind."
The city's hum deepened around them.
And for the first time since he had become what he was, Devansh stood in the presence of something he could not classify.
A beginning.