PROLOGUE
After many hours of profound transformation, she woke — changed, and at last complete.
She rose slowly and sat at the edge of the bed. The place was foreign to her and familiar in the same breath, and for a moment she could not hold the torrent of knowing that poured into her from everything her eyes fell upon. She closed them, and stilled the flood — not a flood of thought, but of sensation, for to look upon the room and upon all that lay beyond it gave her nothing so small as a thought.
She experienced it.
The wall before her was no obstacle. She saw past it to the far shore of the lake, and to her favorite clearing, wild still, untouched still, unspoiled by evil. She wished to be there. She reached for it exactly as she knew she should.
But the bed would not release her.
She tried once more, and nothing answered.
She turned to the mirror across the room, and her reflection gave her pause. She looked down at her hands, and in a few moments she understood. What she had once called herself had been a wall around her. A wall without a door. A prison.
She turned and looked upon the man sleeping behind her.
He was held within a vessel much like her own, and altogether different. His walls were thinner. More easily broken. And she could see beyond them now, and she saw him as he truly was. She knew his true name. She knew what he was. And at last she understood what she herself had always been.
She was awake now, fully.
She felt all that she had made, and she felt her dominion over it, and above all of it she knew why she had come. She saw the true intentions of the one who slept beside her — even those he had not yet confessed to himself.
Had this knowledge come to her any sooner — before Gabriel, knowing nothing of what he did, carried her from the place where her waking was meant to end the world rather than wake it — it would have unmade her.
Her singularity in this life had been born of Seth’s impatience. Of his suffering.
And Seth’s true name was another thing entirely.
But she would not turn her mind to that now.
There were older wounds waiting for her.
And far graver matters.
