There is a silence that settles over those who have watched what the world was never meant to show them. It's the silence of a vessel poured too full, still deciding whether to crack.
Pity the one who witnesses such things alone. Pity more the one who witnesses them beside someone they're still learning how to love.
- From the Fourth Archive of the Covenant of the First Stone, author unknown
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Serala couldn't...quite remember how to breathe.
She floated a distance from Damian, held up by wings that had woven verdant threads through their white-gold and still hadn't stopped surprising her. Beneath her impossibly expanded frame, a heart trained since childhood to the measured discipline of a Holy Daughter was beating with none of that discipline at all.
She was watching a man speak to an Ancestor!
