Wukong sat on his cliff watching the gathered beings sort themselves out across the constructed planet.
The catching-up had wound down naturally over the course of the day — conversations reaching their natural ends, old silences refilling, the particular restlessness that settles into a gathering of powerful beings when they've finished talking and haven't yet decided what to do next. It was moving through the crowd in visible waves. People looking at the wormhole. People looking at each other. People looking at the open plain beyond the cliff.
Ares looked at the wormhole for about forty seconds before he said anything.
"I'm going through."
He said it the way he said most things — not as a proposal or a suggestion but as an announcement of something already decided. He was looking at the wormhole's glow on the horizon and his expression had the particular quality it got when he had identified a direction and intended to move in it.
