Chapter 13 The True Mate

• For a long moment neither of them spoke, the forest around them holding its breath in a silence that felt suspended somewhere outside ordinary time.
• The last of the rainclouds had begun sliding east, leaving behind the particular clean, washed stillness that only follows a real storm, and somewhere nearby a stream Thalia knew well from a hundred ordinary afternoons filled the quiet with its steady, unhurried argument with the rocks beneath it.
• It seemed strange to her, distantly, that the world could sound so utterly unremarkable while the ground beneath her own understanding of reality had just shifted so completely.