The road back felt different.
Not the terrain — the same eastern road, the same farming country, the same logging track giving way to maintained cobblestone as they moved southwest toward Crestfall. The difference was internal. The particular quality of movement that has a destination versus movement that has a direction — the first weeks of the journey north had been direction, the horizon ahead undefined, each day's destination uncertain until Sera's maps resolved it. Now there was a destination. Fixed. Known. Three days southwest and then north and then west and home was a specific place with a specific door and a specific person who would open it before he knocked.
