What he did not know was the why.
Ambrose's voice arrived beside him — not addressing him directly, carrying the specific, slightly distant quality of someone thinking aloud in another person's presence, delivering information in the register of someone who is processing it at the same time as they are producing it.
"As a notorious Star Mother—" The title carried weight in the way titles carry weight when they have been earned through a sufficient accumulation of documented consequence. "According to legend, she was born with the talent of swallowing the stars of other awakeners. Taking their natural talents and adding them to her own."
A pause.
"I had always treated it as rumor. Exaggeration. The kind of story that grows in the telling until the original event is unrecognizable inside it."
She looked at the flattened forest. At the specific, comprehensive scale of what a single entity's directive had produced across what had been, that morning, a living, inhabited environment.
