“No,” the being said, “I cannot sense it. If it is to be found at all, you will have to find it. I am uncertain that a simple creation’s breath could control or contain me. But your kind were oft surprising and confounding.” She didn’t tell him that Azoria was definitively not her kind, being Barrani. She understood that to this being, there was probably very little difference—even if his blood was the Lake in which the entirety of the Barrani race rested, awaiting birth or rebirth.

“Can you find Azoria? Are you aware of her?”

“No, Chosen. But I know what was given the Lake, and there is nothing of that in me now. I understand your fear. It is not irrelevant. I am too new, and too unaware. Waking is rebirth. Sleep is death. Neither of these words describe what I am, but you would perish long before the end of the tale of who I am, even diminished by sacrifice and purpose.”

She could not see the words in him. Not by touch, not by healing. She could feel the weight of her marks, the light of them, the exhaustion in focusing the power inherent to them; she sensed no like words in the being whose hand she touched. It was these words, however, that she looked for now—or rather, words like them.

She felt, as she continued her search, a strange but familiar sensation. It took her a moment to place it: she had felt it when she had taken a new name from the Lake of Life—writ small and entirely unlike the actual Lake she would later see. This was...his blood, something entirely unlike hers, or Barrani blood, or Leontine blood.

No wonder she couldn’t perceive thought, intent, memory: it was...words. It was True Words—things she could hear if she listened carefully. But she’d never understood them beyond a flash of insight, an instinctive touch. She would die of old age—or starvation—if she made the attempt to do that here: there was just too much.

She didn’t try. But she thought she knew now where she had to look for Azoria’s name—or what was left of it. It was here, in an environment that was almost natural to its unhoused form. She almost wanted to give up before she’d started; there was just too much here to examine. Too much from which to separate a single transformed word. Azoria had seen the Lake of Life. Given Azoria, she might have understood that housed in this sleeping remnant of an Ancient god was a lake, very like the Lake of Life.

Think, Kaylin, she told herself. Think. What would you want, if you were Azoria? Would you be content to just embed the word?