Neither of them moved.
The hilltop scene held its specific, composed beauty in front of them — the stream, the flowers, the quality of light — and they stood at its edge with the specific, still alertness of two people who have been in the Star Domain long enough to have developed an involuntary, immediate suspicion of anything that presents itself as exactly what they need at exactly the moment they need it.
The Star Domain did not offer gifts.
It offered traps with the aesthetic properties of gifts, which was a different thing entirely, and the difference was the thing that separated the people who survived it from the people who had briefly survived it.
