Before The First Word-Chapter 56: Ch-: Of Familiar Faces Finally Meeting

She breathed. A full breath -- the first one taken in this specific air, this sourceless warmth, the smell of amber blossoms and something older than green. She let it settle.

Uriel stood two paces behind her.

He had completed his assessment before his feet touched the grass -- the six individuals, the shaft, the corners, every position in the garden -- and found nothing requiring action.

He stood in the completion of it with the ease of someone whose work was done.

He looked at Vothanael.

Vothanael was already looking at him.

The forty-five degrees. Not threat-assessment -- he had no threat-response for something that didn’t register as threat.

Not the working-out-from-inside stillness.

Pure attention. The attention of something running a classification against every entry it had accumulated since waking, reaching the bottom of the stack, finding no match, and finding this interesting rather than alarming.

He was curious. Exactly as Gabriel had said.

Uriel looked back.

Something moved through the practical composure of him. Not alarm.

The adjustment of a being that had prepared for one kind of encounter and was receiving a different one -- something that did not fit the preparation and was, against expectation, better for not fitting.

He nodded. A Small gesture...

The nod of a man acknowledging something that merited acknowledgment before the request had been made for it.

Vothanael looked at the nod.

He returned it. With the full deliberate motion of it -- the same weight he brought to every gesture, every word, every morning of the lesson across nineteen days.

The gravity of something that understood the significance of exchanges even while it was still learning what the exchanges were called.

Gabriel had not yet looked at him.

She was still looking at the garden. At the ember-copper tree’s flowers. At the gold of the seventh tree’s canopy.

At the single pale gold leaf -- the first one, still visible at the tip of the highest branch, held by a hundred others now but present, unchanged, the same leaf that had been there since the fruit was divided and everything began to move.

The expression on her face was the expression of someone receiving a place they have loved from a distance and discovering that the distance was the smaller version of the truth.

That what they had loved was not inadequate. Just incomplete. That the thing itself was the missing part of the love they had been carrying for all the long years of the world.

She had loved this garden since before it had a seed.

She breathed.

. . .

Amara stood.

Fieldwork instinct: something just changed, take stock.

She was on her feet before the decision finished completing itself. The garden full and flowering around her. The gold still just visible in the corner, fading slow.

Two figures she had not seen descend. The woman with the golden hair -- and the garden holding her in a specific way, the grass fractionally more responsive in her radius, the sourceless light a shade fuller, the six trees carrying a quality of attention they had not carried sixty seconds ago.

She looked at Vothanael.

He was watching Gabriel.

Not the forty-five degrees. Something different.

The full weight of his attention angled toward something that had bypassed the categorising process entirely -- straight to recognition, the recognition that preceded language, that existed before the capacity for language had been built.

The attention of something that had known this face before faces had a concept attached to them, before knowing had a face to put to what it knew, before the having-known had a place to live.

He looked at her with the quality of someone receiving an answer to a question they hadn’t assembled the language for yet.

Amara looked between them. At the woman from the gold. At the garden holding her. At Vothanael watching her watch the garden.

Eleven years of fieldwork. Forty-three metres of impossible. Nineteen days of learning -- grass, stone, here, before, blossom, awe, weight, carry, beautiful.

Her grandmother’s sixty years of being right about everything. The Wall with its four declarations.

The Primordial ended by hands that had since made a silver butterfly for a woman who documented it as anomalous fine motor output, and smiled for the first time doing it.

She looked at the woman who had walked from gold into her garden.

She opened her mouth.

"Who are you?"

The gold finished settling.

The garden held the question in the sourceless light.

Gabriel turned towards Amara with a gentle smile on her radiant face.

. . .

She looked at Vothanael first.

That was the answer. Before Amara had finished the question -- who are you --Gabriel’s eyes had moved across the garden with the ease of something that had known exactly what it was going to find and had been waiting for the finding for longer than waiting had agreed to be a concept.

She looked at him with the specific quality of someone sighting a thing they have been keeping their eye out for across all the long years of the world, and that thing being, at last, exactly where it should be.

Then she looked at Amara.

"Someone who has been watching your line for a very long time," she said. Warm. The warmth of something that did not do flattery. That had no use for it.

What came out of her voice was the precise truth of what she was, delivered without armour because armour was something you wore when the truth needed protecting. Hers didn’t.

"Someone who was there the first morning your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother decided the texts were worth keeping, when everyone around her had decided otherwise."

A pause -- not hesitation, the pause of someone choosing the right size of word for the thing. "Someone who has been very glad to see this day."

Amara looked at her.

The fieldwork reflex kicked in. Eleven years. Inventory. The golden hair, which was not a colour the natural world produced at that frequency -- too vivid, the colour of a mind that had stopped consulting the rules about what it was allowed to be.

The warmth in the air around her, which was not the sourceless warmth of the garden and was not the same as temperature.

The specific quality of her attention, which had no parallel in Amara’s eleven years and eleven countries except one: the quality she had watched Vothanael bring to everything, the quality of something that had never once looked at anything without the full weight of what it was behind the looking.

The inventory ran. Came back with nothing filed. Every category returned: insufficient prior example.

"You watched my --" Amara started.

"For a very long time," Gabriel said again. Still warm. Still not performing it. The smile that arrived on her face then was the specific smile of someone who understood that the person in front of them needed a moment and was going to give it to them without making them ask.

"You have questions. We have time. The garden is not going anywhere."

She looked at the garden when she said it -- at the six trees in full flower, the seventh tree’s canopy spread wide, the wildflowers open in every direction.

Something moved through her face when she looked at it. Something that arrived before she had decided what to feel, the way the honest things always arrived before the decision.

She had loved this garden, Amara understood, for all the long years of the world.

This was the first time she had been inside it.

. . .

Gabriel crossed to him.

The garden held its breath. Or something happened to the quality of the air that arrived before the word for breath. The sourceless light didn’t change -- it was what it was, always.

Something else changed. The quality of the moment. The specific feeling of a room when the thing it was built for finally walks in.

Vothanael stood.

He had not decided to. His legs had not received instructions.

One moment he was in the grass, the forty-five degrees tilted toward her, running a classification that kept returning the same result -- not in the catalogue, build a new entry, something in the frequency is known, the frequency is known, build the entry -- and the next he was standing.

The body had made a decision without him. The first time in nineteen days that his economy of movement had been bypassed completely, the first time the stillness had broken without a lesson pulling it.

He stood.

He looked at her as She looked at him.

To be Continued...

Author’s Notes: And that brings us face to face with The First Daughter and the Primordial Anomaly. I Hope you all are enjoying my Story so far dear readers...

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