“Hiranya walked into the Meru Saddle's morning light with the careful, uncertain gait of a person relearning a world they had forgotten. His dark hair was pulled back — Rudra noticed the grey that had appeared at the temples, the physical manifestation of four months of sustained emotional processing. His grey eyes, which had surveyed battlefields with the assessing calm of absolute conviction, now surveyed the landscape with something closer to — wonder. The specific wonder of a person seeing beauty they had previously categorised as irrelevant.”