The walk home felt shorter than the walk out, the way a road always does once the hard part is behind it.
They crossed the wide pale plain, and the broken stone country, and the rich forest with its trees that grew the wrong way, and none of it troubled them now. Eleven Skyward beings moved through the country that had once tested them to the edge of their strength, and it simply parted around them.
The Shrine on the high mountain had not changed. The pale carved stone, the dark doorway that kept its own rules about light, the great turning storm waiting patiently inside. But something in the way its countless eyes settled on them as they entered told them the being had felt the change in them before a single word was spoken.
"You return," it said, its deep voice rolling through the chamber, "and you no longer return as you left. Five dragons. Five roosts' worth of power, taken clean, and eleven of you standing where once there were eleven mortals who could not lift a sword."
