Book One – Chapter 19

Every singular existence, however distinct, however different it may be from all others around it, and from all that were before and will be after, carries this one same core within its essence. It is the residue of first creation, the scar left at the first terror, when lesser beings faced not merely something greater, but what is absolute.

Everything that lives carries this primordial echo. Against danger, some may fight and some may flee. In the face of death, some may hide and some may plea. But in the presence of a God, all instincts resolve into one. When one existence is so vast that it leaves no room for another, when the self is driven into nothingness, when we are reduced to a fading voice, when we feel ourselves diminished into darkness and suffocated into silence, then the need is no longer survival. It is no longer resistance. It is recognition. We need to feel that there is still something to us. If we can no longer feel ourselves, we need to be felt through another. We need to be acknowledged in our unmaking. We need to feel that we are not alone.
    

To Yu, the had been that annihilating vastness. She was still. The boundless voice of PRIDE and POWER and PURPOSE reverbrated through him, all-consuming and absolute. Her touch lingered in him; the invasive sensation of her claws sliding between his feathers, pressing into the hollow above his collarbone. One part of him pressed back into it, while the other strained to pull free. She had divided him into two desperate, disparate halves: one that would cower at her feet, and the other that wanted nothing but to flee her. And so, though his mind was torn and flooded and broken and devoured and screaming, his body had carried him here; not to duty, or to locks, or to flight, but into the common room. What he sought was that oldest of instincts, the core impulse of consciousness; not safety, not even survival, but the sense of self.

He could not be alone. Because alone he could not be.

And so he sat, rigid and torn, staring at his talons and staring at the stone around them with all intensity and tension, while seeing none of it.