While this happened, far away in Ryaenara's Dimension of Existence, another one of Noah's bodies sat calmly in the ancient temple among the still stellar lakes.
Ryaenara returned at this time. She came through the gateway alone, and she looked at him seriously, the mirth still absent from her face, her brother's collapse still written in the set of her shoulders.
And Noah looked back at her through his new Quintessential Sight, and saw her for the first time.
Her composition unfolded before him in layers. On the surface ran the strings of her graceful form, fair and slender and humming with an Antiquity's density. Beneath that sat something she had never shown him, a hidden Pantheon, folded down small and quiet inside her structure like a palace collapsed into a locket, its golden threads wound tight and deliberately silenced.
