The first thing Aether noticed was the smell of food.
It drifted to him before anything else did, before sight, before sound, before even the awareness that he possessed a body capable of noticing such things at all. It was warm and familiar in a way that reached past thought entirely, something baked, something simmered slowly with herbs he had known since childhood, and it pulled him upward out of the dark the way a hand pulls a drowning man toward the surface.
He became aware, next, of light. It came through his closed eyelids as a soft amber glow, gentle and unhurried, the kind of light that belonged to late afternoon rather than the harsh clarity of midday. He lay still for a long moment, letting it wash over him, afraid in some small unnamed part of himself that if he moved too quickly it would all dissolve the way so much else had dissolved before.
Then he heard the birds.
