~LYRA’S POV~

I woke up feeling like my body had been through something I hadn’t agreed to.

Not the sharp pain of a training injury, I knew what that felt like. This was deeper. The kind of ache that sits in the muscle below the muscle, the kind you feel when you breathe in too fast or shift your weight the wrong way.

My shoulders were tight. My legs felt heavy from somewhere above the knee down. And my jaw, that was the strange one. Tender in a way I couldn’t explain, not like I’d been hit, more like I’d been clenching it for hours while I slept.

I lay there for a moment, running through the obvious explanations. Kael had been pushing hard on physical endurance all week, yesterday he’d had me running form drills until my lungs protested and then made me do them again, slower, which was somehow worse.

Ryland was working on control and posture, the kind of training that looked gentle from the outside and destroyed you quietly. Between the two of them, bad mornings were the norm now.

I got up, got dressed, and went down to breakfast.

—

Ryland was already there, which was unusual. He came in looking like he’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep, poured himself coffee without looking at the cup, and dropped into the chair across from me with the energy of a man running on habit.

"Morning," he said.

"You look terrible,"

"Thank you," he said, without missing a beat.

We ate. The conversation was easy for a while, the kind of low-effort back and forth that happens when two people are comfortable enough not to need a topic.

He mentioned that one of the eastern patrol reports had come in late. I told him the new kitchen arrangement Cade had approved was working better than the old one. Normal things. Quiet things.

Then he set his cup down and said, casual as anything,

"Oh... before I forget. You wanted to talk to me about something last night."

I stopped mid-bite.

"A discussion?" I said. "Me?"

Ryland raised an eyebrow.

"You came to my study around ten. Said you had something on your mind, that you’d come back to it later." He picked up his cup again.

"I just didn’t want it to slip through the cracks."

The silence that followed lasted one second too long.

I reached back through the previous evening, looking for the shape of it. Sitting with him after dinner, I had that. The sound of the guard rotation in the hallway, the lamp I’d left burning on the side table. I had pieces of it. But the specific thing he was describing, me going to his study, having something on my mind, the decision to come back to it, I couldn’t find it.

Not even the feeling of it.

"Oh," I said. "Yeah. I... it was nothing. I think I sorted it out on my own." I went back to my food.

Ryland watched me for a moment. I could feel it without looking up.

He didn’t push. He never pushed when I didn’t offer, which was one of the things I both appreciated and found quietly unsettling about him, he always knew when to wait.

But it itched at me for the rest of the day.

—

That evening I sat on the edge of my bed and tried to reconstruct the night properly. Not just the pieces, the whole thing, in sequence.

Dinner, I had that clearly. The conversation with Ryland by the fire, probably an hour, maybe a little more. The guard rotation I heard changing in the hallway, that was real, I remembered the sound of boots on the stone floor distinctly. The lamp on the side table.

The book I’d put face down on the mattress.

But the middle section wouldn’t come.

I pressed at it the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts, and it just, wasn’t there. Not foggy, not blurred. Absent. Like a page torn cleanly out of a book so that the pages on either side sit flush and you wouldn’t notice unless you were specifically counting.

I told myself it was the training. Exhaustion. The body shutting down parts of the mind it didn’t need in order to recover. That was a reasonable explanation.

I almost believed it.

—

The next morning, Ryland mentioned it while we were walking through the east corridor after breakfast, the way he mentioned things that weren’t a big deal, quickly, in passing, almost as an afterthought.

"Did you sleep alright eventually?" he said.

"After your walk."

I kept my pace even. "My walk?"

"You passed my study just after midnight," he said.

"Told me through the door you couldn’t sleep. I offered to come out but you said you were fine, that you were just moving around." He glanced at me. "I heard you come back about half an hour later."

I smiled and nodded and said something like yes, I’d felt better after that, and thank you for checking.

And then I stood very still in the corridor after he turned the corner and stared at the wall for a long moment.

I had no memory of it. Not a fragment. Not the decision to get up, not the walk, not the words I’d apparently said through his study door. Nothing.

—

The kitchen maid caught me the next morning.

I was passing through on my way to the training yard and she looked up from the counter with the easy familiarity of someone who’d worked in the packhouse long enough to feel comfortable speaking first.

"Feeling better this morning, my lady? After last night’s walk?"

I smiled. "Much better, thank you."

She nodded and went back to her work.

I walked out into the corridor and stopped.

Two people. Two separate mornings. Both mentioning something I had done at night that I had no memory of doing.

I stood there for a moment and made myself think about it plainly, without flinching from what it meant.

Then I went back to my room, sat down, and started working through it methodically. I went back day by day, the way Eren had taught me to work through information, no assumptions, just inventory. What I could account for, what I couldn’t. What had a clear sequence and what had that same clean absence in the middle.

The gaps weren’t scattered. That was the first thing I noticed. They weren’t random missing moments, a forgotten conversation here, a blurred hour there.

They were consecutive. Whole evenings gone, one after another, starting from around the same time each night and ending by early morning. I had everything around them. I had nothing inside them.

The second thing I noticed was worse.

My body knew something had happened. The deep aches. The jaw tension. The mornings where I woke up more tired than when I’d gone to sleep, like I’d been somewhere and come back and hadn’t been given time to recover from wherever that was.

I sat with that for a while.

The missing time on its own was frightening enough. But the missing time wouldn’t have scared me as much as this. What scared me, the thing I had to force myself to look at directly was that my body had clearly done something with those hours.

I just had no idea what.

I thought about telling Ryland. I nearly did, twice, before I stopped myself both times.

He was already carrying the vial investigation, the eastern border wolf situation, the council fallout from Harlan’s death. One more thing to worry about, one more way for him to worry specifically about me, felt like the wrong call until I knew what I was actually dealing with.

I thought about telling Eren. He would probably already have three theories before I finished the first sentence.

Kael was not even an option, but me thinking about it almost made me laugh at myself.

For now, I kept it where it was. In the inventory. Noted, filed, watched.

But that night, when I got into bed and the lamp was still burning, I lay there staring at the ceiling and made myself a quiet, private decision.

Whatever was happening to me during those hours, I was going to find out before anyone else did.