He was taller on the ground.
That was the first thing she noticed, which was perhaps not the most important thing available to notice in the moment but was what her mind produced first — that he had seemed one way descending and was different now that he was standing on the same earth she was standing on, the way things that existed at a distance resolved into something more specific when the distance closed.
He looked at the field around them.
The frozen field. The suspended soldiers and the stopped weapons and the absolute stillness of everything that was not the two of them, the held breath of a battle paused mid-sentence. He looked at it with the expression of someone regarding something they had arranged and found satisfactory, the calm inventory of a being for whom stopping a war mid-motion was not remarkable, was simply a thing he had done because the moment required it.
Then he looked at her.
She held his gaze.
