Sheba was vast, and her substrate was complicated. She had been built originally by powers Circe did not fully understand, and Eos had remade portions of her, and Circe had, in her own way, contributed.
The substrate of Sheba was not, formally, the substrate of the Tree. Sheba was an exception. Sheba had been built to be an exception. This was why she could keep things.
But Sheba was adjacent to the Tree's substrate, and the Taste was expressing across the Tree's substrate at scale, and adjacency, at this scale, was a kind of contact, and Sheba, for the first time in her life, was able to touch true evil, and that was why she shuddered.
