The thing about Edmund was that he did not arrive.
He was simply not there and then he was, the way a shadow was simply not there until the light shifted and then it had always been there, patient and quiet and entirely unbothered by the fact that you had not noticed it. Elara had stopped trying to explain it to herself a long time ago. The first few times she had looked for a door he had come through or a window left unlatched or some physical mechanism by which a human being could enter a space without announcing themselves. She had found nothing. She had eventually concluded that Edmund operated by a different set of rules than the ones she had grown up understanding and had filed that conclusion away under things that were true and did not require further examination.
She felt him before she saw him.
