The morning gold held for a few more minutes as they went — the city receiving its daily forty minutes of looking exactly as it was and being lit for the seeing of it, the ordinary extraordinary thing that happened every clear morning whether anyone was there to see it or not.
Today someone was there to see it.
That was, she thought, the point of the adjacent things.
Not that they were extraordinary.
That someone was there.
.
.
.
# The Workshop and the River and What Happened Between
Oren was already working when they arrived.
This was, Elara had come to understand, simply Oren's state of being — he existed in a condition of working the way the river existed in a condition of moving, not because he had decided to work at this particular moment but because work was his natural mode and not-working was the thing that required a decision. The workshop was warm already despite the early hour, the lamp lit, the bench covered in the organized stages of something new.
