He crossed the bedroom to the living room's library and picked up the small, worn-looking book resting on the side table, the same book that had followed him for more than a decade, sitting wherever he was and looking, at every glance, like something of no consequence — a shabby cousin at a gathering of aristocrats.
Only someone who truly understood books would have recognized what it actually was, and Phei himself had not, not until very recently, despite having carried it in his hands for over ten years.
Sometimes divinity sat on your shelf for years while you treated it like decoration, and the universe rarely bothered to correct you; it had a sense of humour that leaned toward cruelty and a patience for irony that bordered on the divine.
