They came down through the Carcosa from the far side, where the currents ran slow and black and nothing had ever been built, and the snow fell around them the whole way.
Phaedra flew at the front with one hand raised, and from her fingers a pale dawn-light ran out ahead of them into the dark, and wherever it touched, hidden paths lit up silver through the bent currents, the ways existence had been keeping to itself.
"THE Dawn That Does Not Ask," she had said when she first called it, and after that she said nothing more, and only followed the silver.
It was a glorious Vein, a Power of Existence from her Essara of Light.
Thessaly flew beside Lifthrasir with her crimson-trimmed gown snapping in the wind of their passage and her chin in her hand.
"This is the dullest corner of existence I have ever seen," she announced, for the third time. "Nothing good lives here. Nothing good has ever lived here. Why would anything wake up here, of all places?"
