The fragments and the feeling behind them, an offer outstretched across the distance of a desk and a mystery yet unsolved: where are you?

Paul unfolds, his knees opening into a half-lotus as he reaches back, gathers Iskierka's slight weight into his hands with the delicacy of a boy who learned to handle knives and seashells thin as breath at the same time. He's careful of her wings and her antennae, her exposed coremata, the vulnerability that Merlinus holds inside himself behind veils and names and abstracted wisdom.

But it's impossible to be in the world, and not of it. Paul is learning that too, between the hard place of this world and the rock he has tried to make of himself. He cradles Iskierka close, but not crushing, and lowers his face to her tiny ministrations.

He's seen enough butterflies on sandspurs, at the corners of animal eyes, to wonder what she might do as the sea gathers at the fringes of his lashes.

"Thank you," he says, quietly, and closes his eyes.