The air at this altitude was cold.
Not the biting cold of high mountains or open sea winds—but the particular cold of a forest night at speed, where the temperature dropped steadily the higher you climbed and the faster you moved through it. Damien had stopped noticing it some time ago. It had become background, the way most constants became background once the body accepted them as fixed.
What he noticed instead was the forest below.
From up here, it was a different thing entirely from what it was on the ground. Down there it was density and weight and close terrain, the sense of being inside something that was larger than you and indifferent to your presence.
Up here it was a surface. An expanse. A dark, unbroken canopy stretching outward in every direction under the night sky, the treetops catching faint starlight and returning almost none of it.
Vast.
