Cael Athis looked exactly as Rohan remembered it, and somehow nothing like he remembered it at all.
The Rustwake's descent carried them down through the same thin, ash-hazed atmosphere he'd once thought would be the last sky he ever knew, the same violet-tinged light bleeding across a horizon of grey, wind-scoured wasteland stretching out beneath them in every direction. He'd spent months learning to survive beneath that light, learning its moods, its dangers, its rare, hard-won mercies. Seeing it again now, after everything the Halcyon Span and the Wraithfall Fringe and the fracture at Ashford had shown him, it looked smaller than he remembered — not less dangerous, exactly, but somehow less vast, less final, than it had felt the day he'd first opened his eyes on this planet with nothing but a spear and a goddess's uncertain mercy.
