A week passed in silence.
Too much silence though.
Even the disciples who usually hovered around gossiping in the courtyards had grown strangely polite when I passed.
That alone told me something was wrong.
The first few days, my team tried to convince themselves it was over—that Elder Harun's intervention and the Grand Elders' lack of reaction meant the matter with Elder Maren had been buried. But by the fifth day, when not even known busybodies of the inner circle came sniffing around for news, the unease we felt grew.
I trained and sparred with my team as usual. Yet there was a tension beneath every move I made, a readiness none of us could quite name.
Teshan voiced it first, as he always did when the air got too heavy.
"This is unnatural," he muttered one night while cleaning his blades. The firelight gleamed on the steel.
"People won't just forget what happened."
