He stood with the five hundred sixty markers.
The candles were low.
He thought about names.
About the name they'd decided.
About the child who had been reading the settlement's ambient temporal field as its baseline environment for fifteen weeks and would arrive into the specific quality of a place that named its dead and named its living and maintained this field in all weather.
He put the Fenryn figure in his hand.
'Vael's son,' he thought. 'Eighty years old when he died. Curious about everything. This is where she wanted him to go. Where things that mattered happened.'
'What happens here is not spectacular most of the time,' he thought. 'It's the morning routine and the folio and the kitchen Thursday meal and Kelvin's supply protocols. It's Freda writing theory she can't cast and Cael sending formal requests to archives that may not respond.'
'And occasionally it's a fight with an Ancient God or a Tenth Seat demon lord or an Archbishop.'
