Elara sat on the gorge’s edge, legs dangling over a darkness that had no bottom. “So you came to ask me permission.”
“I cannot ‘stop’ anything,” Venn said, and for the first time, she heard exhaustion—not human tiredness, but the weariness of something that had held the world’s seams together for eons. “I can only choose . An aodain chooses which thread to pull. That is our nature. But I am the last. And every choice I make now is permanent. No other aodain will be there to catch what I drop.” aodains
And somewhere—in the gorge, in the salt wind, in the pause between a heartbeat and the next—Venn smiled for the first and last time, because being remembered was not the same as being gone. Elara sat on the gorge’s edge, legs dangling