The Chasm, which was sealed by dimensional architectures even ARIA could not, in honesty, fully understand.
What had been the nature of the wounds upon her, the blood upon her, the marrow drained from her hand.
Why had ARIA's bond to her Master cried out, half a kilometre east of here, in the wet, bewildering grief of something pulled out of her — and why was that grief, now, gone?
The questions stacked. They did not collapse. ARIA chose, with the patient discipline of a goddess rationing her own bewilderment, to let them stand unanswered for another hour.
She rose.
The girl in her arms did not stir.
Nyxire watched them go.
In the great, mythic patience of her face — there was something almost fond.
The small, almost imperceptible warming of the eyes that horses, in the dim catechism of equine expressiveness, could just barely allow themselves.
