THE First Gu of Emotions hung frozen in the river of light, and inside it, Emotive spread.
Noah watched her go. Her fourteen colors had reached every thread now, and they kept going, deeper and deeper into the stiff, silent body of the Gu, replacing rage with her rage, grief with her grief, joy with her joy, until the vast thing hanging in Ruination's glowing dark held hardly a feeling that was still its own.
Then something brushed the edge of his existence from very far away.
It was faint and enormous, and it was spreading. Noah lifted his head.
"Ruination," he said. "Keep me updated."
"Yes, Master," she said at once, and bowed, and the crimson light of her existence let him go.
He opened his eyes in the Chrysalis.
The torn silk drifted around him where the storm of feelings had been. Achilles hung nearby, curled in on himself, his existence still flickering and settling and flickering again as he fought to hold it in one shape. And above them both, the sky was changing.
