The tribulation's final echoes faded and Layton stood where the cave had been, the crystallized glass of scorched earth beneath his feet the only evidence that anything unusual had occurred. He bathed in the afterglow of the transformation.
He could feel the world differently now. Not in the vague intuitive sense that sometimes accompanied a shift in one's circumstances, but with the direct and unambiguous clarity of a link, a merger with the fundamental principle that entwined with everything in the world. It was a principle that underpinned everything here, visible now in the same way that a language becomes visible to someone who has just learned to read it, always present, previously illegible. He couldn't fully grasp it, not in its totality, not yet, but he was able to glimpse a portion of it, and in simple words it was this:
Movement was life. Stagnation was death.
