The sun hung high and imperious over Hell's Paradise Island, bullying the perpetual chill out of the place and conjuring, in its stead, something almost obscenely summer-warm. The Infinity Chaos Hotel's black glass drank the afternoon down in dark, ravenous gulps, every pane swallowing the light like a thing starved for centuries and only now permitted to feed.
The golden rays came down arrogant; there was no other word fit for the angle of them — divine, insufferable, swaggering across the island as though the celestial body above had personally arranged the weather to remind every lesser shadow precisely where it stood in the order of things.
The places that drank the gold gleamed while the places that didn't were simply, pointedly, beneath notice.
Phei stood at the hotel's entrance with Elena tucked against one side and his goddess at the other and looked out past it all.
The forest looked back.
