They stepped outside, and the light hit him.
Not the cloud-filtered, diffuse, secondhand light that Raizen had lived under his entire life. Direct sunlight, pouring through the hole in the sky at a morning angle that turned everything it touched into something more vivid than he could imagine colors can be. The wooden platforms blazed gold. The leaves in the canopy above were emerald - not the muted, grey-washed green of normal daylight but the saturated, almost aggressive green of vegetation receiving unfiltered solar radiation for the first time in living memory.
The air itself looked different. Cleaner, as if the sunlight had burned away a layer of atmospheric haze that nobody had known was there. The edges of far away objects were crisper. Colours were more vibrant. Shadows - real shadows, dark and defined, cast by a single source rather than the omnidirectional glow of the cloud ceiling - fell across the platforms in patterns that changed as the sun moved.
