The name of a goddess had fallen into the chasm between them, and the silence that followed was heavier than any stone. It was a silence that absorbed sound, that pressed in on them with the weight of eons. The starlight path, once a source of terror, now felt like a fragile thread of sanity in a world gone utterly mad.
Gao Lian was the first to break. She let out a short, sharp laugh that was like the crack of a whip. "Guanyin," she repeated, tasting the word as if it were poison. "The Bodhisattva of Compassion. The one who 'hears the cries of the world.'" She spread her swollen, purple hands in a gesture of furious disbelief. "Well, she must be deaf, because all I hear is my own blood screaming in my veins. This is a trick. A lie woven from our own memories to make us give up."
