While his human body stood in the Sacred Hall of Truth with its hand on the shoulder of a transforming old man, Damian's beast body floated in the skies above the Cradle of First Flames and looked down at the world below.
The Cradle spread beneath him for miles in every direction, crimson Acacia and golden Baobab and blue-stemmed grasslands catching the afternoon light, the Spring of First Waters running clean through channels that hadn't existed a week ago, the seven World Trees rising like pillars holding the sky up from the earth. The beast delegation was down there somewhere among the transformed paradise, Masamuk and Tiaret and King Mafube and his procession moving through the sacred garden with the reverent careful steps of beings who understood they were in a place that operated by different rules than the world outside its borders.
It was beautiful.
And Damian could not get the Ancestral Celestials out of his mind!
