The river ran low and slow beneath an unfamiliar sky.
It moved without sound, a wide ribbon of pale water the color of weak tea, sliding over rounded stones that did not look like any stone Tenebria had seen in nine dimensions. The sky above it was the wrong color for any hour. Not the black of deep void, not the blue of a planet's morning, but a soft and endless grey-gold, as if dawn had been caught halfway and told to wait. There was no sun. There was light, but it came from everywhere and nowhere, settling on the world like dust.
Trees lined the far bank. Tall, thin, their bark white and their leaves a deep violet that hung still in air that carried no wind. Beyond them, low hills rolled away into a haze, and farther still, almost lost in the grey-gold distance, the suggestion of mountains that were too regular in shape to be natural.
Tenebria crouched at the water's edge, turning a fish over a small fire.
