And it knew me.
The way Thiece had said, known by me first, before anyone else decided what to call it. I didn't know how long I stood there.
Long enough for the images to slow to a trickle, and I understood them no better than I had in the first moment I touched it. Long enough for the chamber to become something other than frightening.
I looked at the column one more time, still pulsing, slow and patient, no different from before. It had given me what it had to give and asked nothing in return, which was more than most things managed.
My magic had settled back to that small ball inside me, right at my sternum, and it hummed within me, almost like it was purring.
“Thank you,” I said to the empty chamber, to the column, to whatever had been patient enough to wait for me to show up and finally look. The air grew suddenly tight, as if the cavern itself had inhaled, and then a burst of light shot out, almost blinding me. I crouched instinctively, arms over my head, and when I looked again, the column was nothing more than a solid mass of stone.
No light. No colors. Not even the veins I’d seen in the stone on the way down.
There was no life in the stone in front of me. Not anymore. I looked around in the darkness. A flash of light was there and then gone.
Like a blink.
And suddenly, I didn’t feel alone down here anymore. I fought back my panic and slowly turned and walked back to the tunnel, up toward the light.
The basin was gray, cold, and ordinary when I emerged. I’d seen the world in color, and now I was back to the gray and white of the tundra of Crystallese.
Nothing followed me. I breathed out in relief as I looked around. This land I knew almost as well as I did myself.
I stood at the tunnel entrance, blinking in the flat daylight, and felt the cold settle back around me.
I am not the same person I was when I went in. Everything is different… and I am the same. Everything is the same… but I have changed.
Both of those things were true at the same time, and I wasn't yet sure what to do with that.
I looked up at the ridge.
Seryn was where I'd left him, a dark shape against the gray sky, crouched, still, and patient in that way of everyone from the valley.
Only there was another shape beside him.
Broader. Darker cloaked. They rose from their crouch as I watched. They stood with feet apart, arms crossed, and head slightly bowed, in the posture of someone who had been waiting for a while, had decided to be patient about it, and was not entirely succeeding.
I knew that posture.
I knew it the way I knew the lodestone pointed north, the way I knew the smell of a skarveld before it hit, the way I knew my own heartbeat without deciding to, without meaning to, just a known constant inside my body.
I stood at the tunnel entrance at the bottom of the basin, looked up at the ridge, looked at him, and felt something in my chest pound in a way that had nothing to do with the column's magic and everything to do with the fact that he was here.
He'd come.
I started walking toward the ridge, maneuvering effortlessly through the waterspouts.
He didn't move forward. He waited, the way he always waited — with the practiced patience of a man whose patience was hard won and was on the brink of running out.
His eyes were on me from the moment I emerged, and they stayed on me as I crossed the basin floor. When I finally climbed the ridge and stood in front of him, the look on his face was not the careful blankness, not the assessment, and not the almost-smile. It was something else.
Something that left me neither calm nor wary, and something I wasn't ready to examine directly.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
I looked at him. At those warm brown eyes that held no warmth, steady on mine in the flat gray light.
It was the first time he'd asked me that. He wasn’t being practical or strategic. At this moment, he was being personal.
