Sarya woke beneath the tree.
There was no light gathering behind her eyes, no sudden awareness of danger pulling her out of sleep, no dream dissolving too quickly to hold onto. She simply opened her eyes and found herself already at peace, in a way that took her several long moments to recognize precisely because it was so unfamiliar. Not the peace of exhaustion. Not the peace of relief after crisis. Just an ordinary, uncomplicated stillness, the kind she hadn't experienced since before the Nexus had first opened inside her.
The air here felt different than any air she'd breathed before — not thinner or thicker, not scented with anything she could name, but somehow inhabited, the way a house feels inhabited even when no one is speaking in it.
She sat up slowly beneath the great tree and looked out at the meadow she had glimpsed only in fragments before, and for the first time it held its shape completely, refusing nothing.
