“No,” he said softly. “It is not. We exist, we come into being, with purpose. It is not what defines you—but your kind often seek the echoes of greater purpose without fully understanding the cost. I do not rage. I do not feel that I was thrown away, that I was meant to die in the stead of others. Perhaps that is not something you can fully comprehend. You have seen my blood in the Lake of Life.”

She stopped breathing for a long moment.

“Do you consider it unnecessary sacrifice? From the moment they were born, the entire Barrani race has lived, breathed, grown because of my blood. You have seen my blood in the chronicle—I believe you call it a mirror. There are places you have not touched, have not seen, but should you, there are traces of me in all of them.”

“But—”

“How came I to be here?” He smiled as if in approval. She thought a promotion from corporal to something higher wouldn’t have so instantly warmed her, and flushed at the thought.

“You think of this as...the outlands. As a place that exists beyond the borders of your plane. Your reality. But you have seen it in the heart of the being you call home; you have seen it in Hallionne, created to be shelter and peace for those who were weary.”

“I’ve seen it around Ravellon,” she said.

“Yes. Even there. It is not a place. It is possibility, except in one way: it cannot create sentience. Life? Yes. The trees you see here are alive. The insects, should I choose that detail, alive. But even the forest creatures of your world cannot be created entirely from the ether without will and some small part of ourselves as the price demanded.

“This is what all worlds were before they were touched and shaped; this is what all worlds came from, when words were invoked. The speaking was difficult; it drained the speakers, the words flowing from them to be lost forever, the lands whose tale they told immutable, fixed, the lives within them separate, the possibilities narrowed.” His smile was odd. “To us, then, your worlds might seem almost dead.”

“What?” She glanced at Hope.

Hope’s head was bowed, his eyes closed, his tiny jaw shut. He had withdrawn the wing that revealed nothing more unusual than her own eyes could see, and had folded it across his shoulders. He stood, however; the indolent drape that implied boredom was nowhere in sight.

“They are not dead. To those of us who came after, they are teeming with possibility. It is a constrained possibility. It has its own boundaries, its own form—but within that form, so many variations. You are one of them.”

He then raised his empty hand. Kaylin didn’t understand the words he spoke.