His mother's expression flickered — not confusion, not the careful, generic warmth she'd worn throughout his entire stay, but something closer to genuine uncertainty, as though the name itself had struck against some limit neither of them had previously encountered.
"Who?" his father asked, and the single word carried none of the smooth, practiced quality of every previous answer. It carried genuine, blank incomprehension, the particular flatness of someone reaching for information that simply didn't exist within them to find.
"Elane," Rohan repeated, voice tightening with a fear he could no longer fully suppress. "Elane Ryker. My closest friend. The person I spent most of the past however-many months fighting alongside, in the Origin Realm, before I ended up somewhere I never should have gone. You've never once asked about her. Not once, in two weeks. Why?"
