Upon a golden cloud inside a sealed killing field, an old woman refilled her tea and could not remember the last time an afternoon had given her this much.
She had drifted along inside the formation the entire way, unseen and unsensed, and now she floated barely above the coils of the great Serpent as the party finally cornered its target.
"Well now. Let us see what the target was..."
Her ancient gaze swept the trapped golden island, and it snagged, immediately, on the crowned figure at its heart! She read him the way she read all creatures, peeling the layers with eyes older than the frameworks beneath them, and for the first time in an age…the layers pushed back!
"Hm. Now that is unusual. A young thing. A very young thing, barely into its Trueness, and yet it smells of my own kind. There is Primeval weaving threaded through it, which should not be entirely possible..." She sipped, and her wrinkled eyes narrowed with genuine delight.
