Nobody moved.
The leaf sat between the open pages of the ledger and the room sat around it, and the particular stillness that follows an utterance that changes the meaning of everything said before it settled over the lower archive the way sediment settles—completely, and into every available space.
Sarya became aware, in the slow way of noticing something that has been true for several seconds, that the older Witness was not looking at the leaf.
He was looking at Father.
Not with accusation. Not with expectation. With the expression of someone who has been waiting, across a distance of time too large to calculate casually, to see whether a particular moment will finally arrive. Whether the person he is watching will, at the end of all the intervening years, choose to put down the thing they have been carrying long enough to let someone else see what it weighed.
Father met his eyes.
Something passed between them.
