The world outside the Temple was loud.
Not with sound the borderlands they moved through in the first days were quiet by most measures, scrubby hills and thin paths through dry autumn grass, the kind of terrain that absorbed noise rather than creating it.
What was loud was everything else. The emotional texture of uncontained space. The way wind carried feelings across long distances without the Temple's walls to filter them. The sheer quantity of information available to two children whose senses had been calibrated in a controlled environment and were now encountering the uncontrolled version of everything those senses could detect.
