The chamber was quiet in the specific way of places that have just had something enormous happen in them and haven't yet decided what to do with the air that was left.Benimaru and Gabimaru were still on their knees.One knee each, heads slightly bowed, the sickly green light of their resurrected eyes directed at the stone floor in front of them. The smoke from the awakening had thinned,curling upward in slow lazy columns from the cracks where the resurrection had worked through the stone of them, the last physical evidence of what had just happened dispersing into the dark of the chamber's high ceiling.They were still.The specific stillness of things that had been still for a very long time and had only recently been reminded that stillness was a choice rather than a condition.The Grand Master looked at them.Then he said, simply…"Arise."They moved together.Not one and then the other,together, the coordination of it was so complete that it looked like one action performed by t

And the five of them stood in it, Dero, the twins, Gull, Web, Kyx, with the specific atmosphere of a group that has been assembled by external circumstance rather than personal preference and is beginning to take stock of that fact.……….Benimaru looked at the door the Grand Master had exited through.Then at Dero.Then at Web.Then at Gull.Then he looked at the floor where he had been lying and the specific expression on his face was the expression of someone deciding whether the floor had been worth the elbow.He had not yet decided.The chamber had gone from the Grand Master's presence to something considerably less formal in the space of about thirty seconds.Benimaru was looking at Web.Not the way Dero looked at things, Dero's looking had precision in it, the looking of someone reading a situation. Benimaru's looking was different. It was the looking of something that had picked up an object and was deciding whether the object was interesting."You." He said.Web looked at him

Jabber had spent months with Loki in this body. He knew the quality of Loki's attention, the dry, particular intelligence of it, the sarcasm that sat at the surface of everything like a layer of lacquer over wood. The warmth that lived underneath the sarcasm, real and deep and not discussed.What was in those eyes right now had none of the warmth.What was in those eyes was something older than the warmth. Something that had existed before the warmth was built, the foundation under the building, the thing that the building of who Loki had chosen to be had been built on top of."Jabber." Loki said.The voice was his. Completely his,same register, same quality, same resonance. But stripped of everything that had been built onto it over the long years of a different kind of existence."I need the body." Loki said.Jabber looked at him."Loki…""I need it now." Loki said. "I need to take it back and I need you to let me have it." He was not asking. He was not threatening. He was stat

The snake's shadow covered all of them.That was the first thing, not the size of it, not the specific details of the scales, but the shadow. The way it fell across the group like a curtain being pulled, like the light in that section of the forest had made a decision about where it was and was no longer available.They were six feet from its head.The head alone was wider than the carriage they had been riding in. The scales across the top of it were the specific deep green of something that had been in this forest long enough to take on its colour, not painted, grown into it, each scale a slightly different shade from the ones around it the way natural things are never quite uniform. The tongue came out again, long, dark, forked at the tip, and moved through the air slowly, tasting, reading, doing the specific work of something that had all the information it needed and was confirming it.Its eyes were open.That was the thing about the eyes, they were open and they were enormous a

The rabbit was gone.Elara's hand went to her mouth.Mira's eyes were wide in a way that she would have objected to if she had been aware of it.The serpent's tongue came out.Tasted where the rabbit had been.Went back in.Flora looked at Mira.At Elara.At the wide eyes."Do you understand?" She asked, in the tone of someone presenting a conclusion that the evidence has thoroughly supported, "What I have been saying?"Three heads nodded.Rapidly.…….The rabbit was gone.The serpent was still.And the forest around them was very quiet in the way that forests go quiet when the thing at the top of the food chain has just demonstrated its capabilities and everyone who witnessed it has made the appropriate adjustments to their behaviour.………………The forest held its breath.Or it felt like it did, the specific stillness that had settled after the rabbit disappeared was the stillness of a space where something had just happened and everything in it was waiting to see if anything else was