Sable arrived on a Tuesday.

Marina felt her coming before she saw her. The frequency signature she had been carrying since the source pulse, faint and familiar and running at the same root magic as Marina's own, strengthened through the ground channels as the morning moved toward noon. By the time Sable crossed the boundary stones Marina was already at the edge of the camp waiting.

Sable was not what Marina had built in her mind over thirty years of absence.

She was not the monstrous version that lived in the years when Marina had been most angry. She was not the tragic version that Marina had constructed after learning...