POV: Aphrodite
She can feel disaster approaching.
I stopped trying to sleep about an hour ago. I lay still for a while with my eyes closed, doing the breathing that is supposed to settle a racing mind, and my mind did not settle. It kept returning to the same things in the same order. The map with the pulsing prison sigil. The argument around the fire. The way the ruins felt when I was in that sealed chamber, aware in a way that stone shouldn't be aware. And underneath all of it, running like a current beneath everything else, that feeling I've had since we came in here that the place is deciding something about us. Not whether we live or die. Something more considered than that. Whether we're worth what it costs to let us through.
I give up on sleep and sit up.
