Asher's Past

Or so I thought.

As the tension between us and the Circle reached a boiling point, something else had begun to gnaw at the edges of my consciousness. A mystery that had been quietly simmering in the background for as long as I’d known Asher—the man who had been by my side through every battle, every crisis. Yet, I realized, I knew so little about him.

The morning after our grim revelations about the Heartstone and the Convergence, I found Asher standing on the terrace, staring out at the sprawling forests beyond the mansion. His expression was unreadable, and I had long learned that with Asher, unreadable usually meant he was thinking about something darker than he wanted to admit. He’d always been the calmest of us, the one who kept a level head even when things were at their worst. But now, even from a distance, I could see the strain.