A king crowned in golden flame, a warrior clad in white armor of purity, a monster wrapped in abyssal shadow so deep it appeared to have its own gravity. A scholar surrounded by orbiting runes that rearranged themselves continuously into new configurations.
Winged forms and broken forms and beautiful forms and perfect forms, each one distinct, each one carrying the specific, unmistakable quality of something that had once been real and was now here, beneath the surface, preserved in the collection.
And in between the forms that could be seen and understood lay things that could not be. Emotions so dark they registered as pressure rather than feeling. Losses of such magnitude that proximity to them produced the phantom sensation of something irreplaceable being removed from the chest.
