The borderlands smelled like smoke and dry grass and the specific kind of freedom that came from being too far from any governing body for the governing body to care about you.
Aelara had forgotten that smell. She had forgotten it the way you forgot things that had been replaced by something so complete that the original became abstract she had spent three years inside the Temple's silver light and the Temple had its own smell, stone and old wood and something that was not quite incense and not quite rain, and that was what she had been breathing for three years and it had become the default of her senses without her noticing.
The borderlands smell hit her on the second morning out of the Temple like a memory she had not known she was missing.
