Chapter 7: The Rashen Find Them First

The morning came in categories.

First: light, the low sideways light of a sun that rose reluctantly over the ashfield and arrived as heat before it arrived as brightness, the way punishment arrives before its justification. Second: sound, which on Durath meant almost nothing — a silence so complete and specific that it registered as a presence rather than an absence, the desert's version of a held breath. Third: the visions, which were already there because they had never left, the burning patient and structural at the back of his mind, the sand-death waiting in its several versions, the becoming doing what doors did.

Cael surfaced from the borderland with the canteen still in his hand. He had not let go. His fingers had recorded the night independently of whatever he had been doing with the rest of himself.