POV: Aphrodite
Knowledge hurts worse than wounds.
He's been standing in the corridor long enough to have heard everything.
I know this from the quality of his expression when he steps through — the specific quality of someone who has been carrying a truth in private and has just heard it stated in the language of other people, the truth finding its final external form in the space between my father's words and my own and Eros's and Lyra's, and the finding of that form producing the specific relief and grief of something that no longer needs to be managed alone.
He doesn't deny it.
"Since the ruins," he says. "I've been preparing since before the bond settled, since the first time I understood what the ruins' visions were building toward and what the Direwolf blood's connection to the divine architecture meant for the conflict that was coming."
He sits.
