The spilled tea had soaked into the boards where she knelt.
The cold of the Fiend's visit still hung in the air, and her throat still ached where his fingers had held it. She could feel the words he had pressed into her, sitting at the back of her jaw like a bruise. He had walked into her home and out again without once slowing his stride.
She had spent an age keeping still!
That had been the whole of her strategy. Stay quiet, hold what she had lost on the Mountain of Gu without stirring it, and maybe the currents would pass her porch by. She had told herself the stillness was a kind of strength. That keeping the past intact and undisturbed was itself a way of enduring.
The Fiend had taken ten seconds to show her what it actually was.
