The silence was complete.
They were walking, or believed they were — there was motion in the sense that something in each of them registered forward progress, and yet no sensation accompanied it.
No pressure of feet against ground. No shift of weight from step to step. Earth had not shrunk behind them the way distant things shrink.
It had simply become less immediate, the way a memory becomes less immediate the longer you carry it, without ever losing its truth.
No stars passed overhead. No wind touched them. The horizon, if there was one, did not shift with their movement, because movement in any sense they understood did not seem to be occurring.
Kael checked his instruments compulsively, the way a person checks something not because they expect it to have changed but because the checking itself is a way of holding onto something familiar.
