Location:Obsidian City
Date/Time:28 Ashbloom, 9939 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm
The pull had teeth.
Yinglong felt it the moment they crested the ridge east of the trade road — a warmth that settled into the quintet bond like sunlight through water, diffuse and directionless and absolutely, unmistakably real. Silver queen essence. Not the faint directional tug that had guided them southeast across three weeks of frontier wilderness. This was presence. Close. Breathing-distance close, if she'd been in her true form and the sky had been open and the world had been shaped the way it was supposed to be shaped.
But she wasn't. And it wasn't. And the source — that maddening, beautiful warmth — had no location.
