Chapter 42: The Seed and the Sapling
The cottage was a poem of ordinary things. It was the smell of salt-blasted timber and the wax Kaelen used on the newly-straightened door. It was the sound of rain on the slate roof, a steady, domestic percussion after the silent void of the Empyrean Reach. It was the view from the small, deep-set window: a slash of the Stillwater's now-orderly turquoise, a strip of sky, and the gnarled, friendly arm of an ancient driftwood pine. For three weeks, this was the entirety of their world, and it was a world so complete it felt like a second, smaller salvation.
