The silk robe sat in a heap in the far corner of the bedroom. It lay there like a discarded skin, pool-white and shimmering with a faint, dying luster that didn't belong to the mud or the wood of the house.
Alias stepped over the threshold into the main living room wearing a spare of the simple, sand-colored linen tunic he had worn for the past month.
The fabric was coarse against his skin, slightly scratchy, and wholly imperfect. He preferred it. It felt heavy. It felt like reality.
The atmosphere in the house was dense, charged with a quiet, vibrating shock that hadn't quite dissolved, even after the tears on the porch had dried.
Theo sat at the heavy wooden table he had carved with his own hands, his massive frame hunched over a piece of dry timber he was mindlessly turning over and over.
His chest was bare, but just as Alias had made it, the skin where the jagged scimitar had torn him apart was perfectly smooth, radiating that strange, residual warmth.
