Leaving the Cold Place was easy. It was the page that came back with him.
Noah drew his attention up out of the frozen underworld and settled it into the body that waited for him in his Existential Root Domain, and the sheet of ice came too, hanging at the edge of his thoughts with a vast, greedy face set into it. THE UNPAID COLLECTOR!
An Immense One. Bring him into a domain and hold him there a few seconds!
Impossible, he had told the Caretaker.
Well...maybe not entirely impossible!
The Collector was a being who wanted things. That was the whole of his nature, written into his very name. And not so long ago, in the Vasiliou Elsedimension, that same Immense One had looked at Thalia and promised, very calmly, that at any moment he chose he would rip them in half.
Noah did not need to find the Collector. He needed the Collector to come looking for something he wanted, in a place Noah had chosen. And for that, he needed Thalia.
