"There is cold in the chaos now," Moriarty said.
"The descending cold has soaked into the flows of existence themselves, and some of the information drifting out there is no longer merely useless. It is frozen. It is destructive. Reach into the flow carelessly now, cast your sieve without the discipline, and you may pull in a sliver of The Long Night itself, a shard of that killing cold, and draw it straight into the heart of your budding Root. And a Root is a fragile thing. It is a seed, cracked open, soft and new. The cold that the mightiest Immense Ones can barely hold at bay would freeze a young Root solid in an instant, and there is no coming back from that. So the Art was always hard. Now it is hard, and it will kill you if your discipline slips."
He looked at Noah steadily. "I would not blame you for waiting. Many do. They grow the slow way and hope to outlast the winter. Some of them even manage it."
"Show me the Art," Noah said.
Moriarty regarded him a moment silently.
