“The thought hit him in the tree hollow, in the amber dark, and it hit with a force that his Vanara body was not equipped to process. The grief was human grief — the specific, complex, layered grief of a son who has died and cannot tell his mother he is alive, cannot tell her he is sorry for the years of adequacy when she deserved excellence, cannot tell her that the chai she made — with too much sugar and not enough ginger, the exact opposite of good chai, the chai he'd complained about his entire life — was the thing he missed most in this underground world of crystal-light and fire punches and stolen powers.”