He did not look like a monster.
I am going to say this clearly because it was the thing I was least prepared for and the thing that shaped everything that followed. I had not consciously constructed an image of something visibly terrible — but I had constructed it unconsciously, the way the mind protects itself by making the category clean. Something that wore its damage on the outside. Something whose appearance would put the confrontation on certain moral ground.
Aldric Vane looked like a man.
Old in the way that things are old when they have not aged but simply accumulated — the sediment of centuries layered into the face, the posture, the specific quality of his stillness. Not frail. Not human-old. The old of stone, which does not soften.
He stood with his hands at his sides and hi
