The light spilling from the ancient Nexus in Aren's hands wasn't bright in any ordinary sense.
It felt familiar. That was what frightened her most as she stood at the bottom of the descending Road, staring at the young figure holding it. She had felt this exact presence before, countless times — in the moments the Nexus first awakened inside her, during visions that had shown her fragments of things she couldn't yet understand, in every impossible crossing she had made across the past two years. Whenever she had stood at the edge of a choice she didn't fully comprehend, this same familiar warmth had been there, waiting somewhere just beneath her own thoughts.
"Were you the one speaking to me?" she finally asked.
Aren didn't answer immediately. He looked at her instead with something that resembled grief, deep and old.
"I was one of them," he said.
Sarya felt the distinction land heavily.
Not the one.
One of them.
---
