PART SIX -- The One Who Only Watched

6.1 -- The Girl at the Edge of the Firelight

Near the far edge of the hall, well outside the warm chaos still spilling gently through the crystal corridors, a girl neither Elowen nor Wren had ever properly met stood half in shadow, watching.

She was slight, dark-haired, dressed plainly in a manner that suggested she hadn't quite decided yet whether she belonged in a place like this at all. Her name was Nerissa, though no one in that hall knew it yet. She had wandered in an hour before, curious about the warmth she'd heard rumored through the wider Between, and had found herself, somewhat to her own surprise, unable to look away from the man at the center of it all -- unhurried, patient, giving each woman who came to him exactly the attention she needed, as though there were no limit at all to how much of himself he had left to give.

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She watched him a long while, arms folded loosely, studying the whole strange, warm scene with the particular careful attention of someone cataloguing something she didn't yet trust herself to want. She noticed the ease of it -- no jealousy, no visible competition, only a kind of easy, overlapping warmth passed freely between dozens of women who all, somehow, seemed to actually like one another. It was nothing like anything she had encountered anywhere else in the Between's long gray stretches.

She didn't approach. Not tonight. She only watched, a little longer than she meant to, filing the whole strange, warm scene away to turn over later, and then slipped back out into the gray quiet of the Between the way she'd come -- curious, unhurried, and not yet ready to be found.

End of Chapter Ten.