I almost laughed. The tone was so direct it was startling, like being spoken to by someone I'd never met who somehow already knew me.
"She was twenty-six," I said.
"Yes," Oren said. "Four years older than you."
I kept reading. The first chapter was context, most of which I now had from Aldric and from Oren himself. The list, the entity, the pattern of approach. She had compiled her own version of the list, shorter than my father's, covering only the cases she'd been able to verify independently. She wrote: It is patient in the way that things are patient when they do not experience time the way we do. This is not a comfort. It means there is no rushing it, no making it hurry, no taking advantage of impatience. Plan accordingly.
The second chapter was the approach. She described the dre
