They had been traveling through Sky for what might have been moments or millennia—time had lost its grip on them the way gravity had never held them here—when they felt it simultaneously: the pull of exhaustion, the weight of all they'd done, the accumulated cost of every transformation they'd undergone. Even beings merged into impossible unity, even eternal lovers who carried both flame and storm, eventually needed to pause, to rest, to simply exist without purpose or mission.
"There," Selena's voice murmured within their shared consciousness, directing their attention toward a formation in the distance.
It was a place where Sky had decided to become almost solid, where the boundless openness had gathered itself into something that resembled structure without quite committing to it. Clouds—if clouds was the right word for masses of condensed possibility—had arranged themselves into a platform, a floating island of soft substance that invited rest without demanding permanence.
