Damian held his Ama, and he held her carefully.
His body was enormous now, more than twice the size of the woman in his arms, and even though she had no physical form for him to bruise, he held her the way a person holds something they are afraid of damaging. Tenderly. With attention to every point of contact.
He had spent eight summers in a Dross tribe convinced he would never hold her again, scraping survival from poor soil while her loss sat underneath every day of it, and now he was holding her, and some part of him was managing his own strength against the possibility that he might somehow lose her a second time through carelessness.
He had taken that tribe and raised it into the sky.
And now he was holding his Ama in his hands!
He was emotional, and he let himself be emotional, but he still looked at her with his obsidian eyes, and he still used every bit of his understanding of THE Primordial Tongue to look past the woman and into what she had become.
