Location:Seven Peaks — Various
Date/Time:TC1853.12.25 — Morning to Evening
Shen Wuyan woke without pain.
The absence of it was so startling that she lay still for a full minute, cataloguing. No ache in her left hip — the one that had been grinding bone on bone for a century. No stiffness in her fingers. No heaviness behind her eyes where the pressure had lived for decades, the slow buildup of a body failing by increments so small you only noticed them when you remembered how it used to feel to not hurt.
She remembered now. It felt like this.
She sat up. The quarters were simple — the same room she'd been assigned when the splinter group arrived, furnished with a narrow bed, a writing desk, and a shelf of books she'd carried across eight hundred years of exile. Nothing had changed about the room. Everything had changed about the woman in it.
The formations hit her first.
