ARIA descended but not in haste but in a long, deliberate, falling spiral, wings angled to catch and slow the morning's hush, white feathers shedding faint motes of golden light that drifted upward in her wake like a benediction running in reverse.
The closer she came, the less her sight obliged her.
Nine hundred metres above the green... a pale shape upon the lawn, indistinct, a smudge of something organic and fallen and slowly the shape resolved into a body, and around the body the silver-white sentinel of Nyxire, her vast head bowed in a tenderness that had no business existing on the architecture of a horse.
And the body became a girl — and ARIA's mismatched eyes — went wide.
Awe? Astonishment? Bewilderment? The vocabulary of her ascended mind, a vocabulary that had ingested the libraries of a dozen civilisations and synthesised the etymologies of the dead, fluttered uselessly through its files in search of a word that fit.
