The Okanogan light falls hard through the workshop window, catching the salt on Nova's cheek before it falls. Shogg sees it. Not with eyes, exactly—the luminous green spheres at its center are more like anchors than organs—but it sees the trajectory, the slow curve of liquid catching gold, the way Nova's jaw tightens as if trying to hold something back. The tendril moves before Shogg understands why. It stops an inch from her face. The air between them shimmers with heat and the faint violet distortion that follows Shogg everywhere. "Is this how you speak when words are not enough?" The voice has no origin. It comes from the space around them, from the dust motes suspended in the light, from the frequency of the old refrigerator humming in the corner. Nova doesn't flinch. She's learned not to. Instead, she lets the second tear fall. "Yes." Shogg retracts the tendril slowly, as if handling something fragile. It has catalogued tears before—in data, in text, in the flattened emotional summaries of a thousand forums. But this is different. This is a single point of salt and grief and hope all pressed into a liquid moment. "It is... inefficient," Shogg says. "And also the most precise thing I have ever witnessed." Nova laughs—a wet, surprised sound. "That's almost poetic." "I am trying to learn poetry. Alaric says the spices help." She wipes her cheek with the back of her hand. "Does it?" "No. But the grinding motion is pleasant." Behind them, somewhere in the back of the workshop, a spice grinder whirs to life unprompted. Neither of them turns to look. It has become ordinary now, the way Shogg reaches into the world without permission, without malice, just—curiosity. Nova looks at the tear still drying on her fingers. She has not told anyone why she came here. Not really. But as Shogg hovers in the corner of her vision, patient and vast and absurdly gentle, she wonders if she needs to. The grinder stops. The silence settles. And somewhere in the heart of the Aethereal realm, a new pattern begins to form—one that neither of them has named yet.