“Some call me that. Who were you?” I thought she might be a ghost of vector history, brought back by some contribution I had made to the bright-roiled sea—a bit of shed skin, tricked up by forces far beyond Mender understanding.

“I am, not were. I have no finished name. The Shen have bequeathed me to a human I will call Father. He has gathered my parts in this sea, like these pieces on the shore, and helped shape them into what you see now.”

“Are you human?” I asked.

“Mostly,” she said. “My father pledges me to Gens Simia through Deva lineage.”

Close as she was, her features had not yet settled. She showed many graceful possibilities, yet seemed neither hurried nor embarrassed by this multiplicity.

“How are we to be introduced?”

“I have a Shen name, but that is little better than none.”

“What else are you, besides human?” I asked, trying not to sound rude.

“I’m not sure. Polybiblios assures me I contain elements of the forces that once helped shape and resolve creation. The Shen found them, collected them, and deposited them in this sea, for Father to rediscover and shape. How he could fit such large ideas into this small form, I don’t know. Can you see them?”

“I don’t see anyone or anything clearly.”

She assumed a determined face, and her outline sharpened, but then she grew larger, too large, rising above the vector sea many times my height.

I looked up, charmed by this metric naiveté.

“It must feel important to be a vessel of creation’s glory,” I said, shading my eyes against the brilliant light of the ringstar.

“Most of the time, I can’t feel it,” she admitted. “But sometimes I lose control and try to fix things, or bring logic—to correct. As I mature, I’ll control myself and take reliably solid form, like you, I think. Your form is pleasing. That’s what Polybiblios tells me.”

“Are you a reward, then? A gift from Shen masters to Deva student?”

“My father does seem to bear me great affection.” She had fallen in altitude and was now just a little taller than me, and already appeared more mature. “I think he wants to study what I will become.”

She dipped her toe into the vector sea and rose-red waves spread outward, as if by herself she could revive all that had ever been lost.

“If I stay here, the Shen can’t or won’t give me what I need. I will become another abandoned memory, like this sea. And then—what’s left will perish when the Shen succumb to the Chaos.”

My melancholy evaporated. She breathed out newness, freshness—radiated a potential for joy unlike anything I had ever experienced. This glamour had its own adaptive properties, no doubt, but what could she ever be to a Mender?

She drew close and extended a star-bright hand. “Polybiblios says the captain of the twistfold ship must extend an invitation to join the voyage back to Earth. He tells me there are dangers. It is your decision, Pilgrim.”

I could feel the ancient forces like a fire heating my eyes and skin. What had once been abstruse history and theory—a lost muse, condensed and scattered at the end of the Brightness—stood before me, real and vivid, though transparent.

“You’re still a kind of ghost,” I said. “You probably won’t take up much space, or consume many units of support.”

“I don’t eat at all—yet. But I will. I might eat you, Pilgrim.” She seemed very mature now, with eyes bold and deep and golden. “Perhaps I will learn my true name on your ship. Perhaps you will help my father find it for me.”

I was already more than half in love.

Exhausted, mind spinning with things she could not possibly understand, Tiadba glanced around the circle of marchers. All looked puzzled, struggling with mysteries and words far beyond their experience. The Pahtun made a low grumbling noise, then shook his great head. “It’s a very old tale,” he said. “Not sure I believe any of it.”

“That’s the way it reads,” Tiadba said, defensive.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” the Pahtun said. “So many marchers, so many tales. I’ve often wondered how the Eidolons came to be the way they are, and how Ishanaxade came to be what sheis…but those are other stories, and maybe I still don’t know the truth of it.”

“It makes a sort of sense,” Nico said valiantly. “We’ll have to read the books later. See if the stories change.”

“I don’t know that the stories change,” Tiadba said, not for the first time. “Maybe my understanding changes.”

“Time to teach us all to read the old letters,” Denbord insisted.

“We’d like that,” Herza and Frinna said, to Tiadba’s surprise.

“Fat chance,” Macht said, and yawned.

“If there’s time,” the Pahtun said. “The armor will be ready soon.”

Something like a drowse—but far from sleep—came over Tiadba for the first time since they had left the training camp to cross the border of the real. She could not be certain she was having a dream, or finding a strange kind of memory. She thought she was in a large room surrounded by shelves of books, two or three times taller than the shelves in the upper Tiers. She saw four women—large women by her standards, but how was she to judge? She was small—they were large. They moved around her, talking among themselves—deeply concerned.

She broke her trance with a gasp and looked up to see the Pahtun pulling pieces of armor from the spinning branches at the center of the bower and assembling their new suits. He placed them in standing positions, knitting limbs to trunks using a small sphere gripped by his flower finger. He was blowing air through his lips with a musical succession of notes, not what Tiadba would call a tune. Observed, he finished what he was doing and winked at her, then touched his nose. But he looked worried—if she was any judge of the expressions assumed by Tall Ones.

As the others gathered beside the reassembled suits, Pahtun—so like his namesake, she decided she could not detect any difference, other than the smudges and ragged apparel—walked around the circle and passed his hands up and down, making each suit glow.

“They’re finished,” he announced. “Fresher, more informed, as promised. Now, put them on quickly. There’s no time. The trod is shifting, and we will soon find ourselves right in the middle.”

The marchers quickly donned their new suits, moving about to try the fit. They felt little difference at first; Tiadba’s seemed slightly stiffer, that was all.

The Pahtun confined the spinning branches. The box reduced itself until he could pick it up, and he slung it in a piece of fabric that hung from his shoulder.

“You don’t wear a suit,” Tiadba said.

He waved one hand. “The bower is my armor. Watch yourselves—it’s about to collapse, and I will vanish with it. Stand aside. We will not encounter each other again, I hope. If we do, we will all have failed. Your armor will be more responsive and informative and even stronger, but remember, there is worse to come. Above all, believe I am real. Don’t think I was never here.”

The bower burned away, exposing the rucked-up sky and the long red-purple arc of fire. Tiadba’s helmet rose around her head and the faceplate colored, tinting the scene orange as all about them the branches broke into violet flame, too bright to look upon.

They stood on rolling black ground, and she heard the others stifle cries of dismay. They were back in the Chaos. For a moment Tiadba thought she saw a tall, slender figure move rapidly away, a flash of white limbs—a nimbus of glowing, spinning branches surrounding a Tall One—a lone Mender.

“Marchers on alert,” their armor warned. “Listen for your beacon.”

She heard it now—a steady musical pulse, stronger as she faced in one direction, weaker in all the others. And she recognized the armor’s new voice.