Her voice - her real voice, unmuddied by a foreign tongue - made his human heart seize painfully in his human chest. He let go of her wrist mostly from surprise, but also because it was too late: as soon as the door slammed behind them, it was gone - melted back into the wall of the temple.

The three of them stood at the top of the stars, illuminated somehow in purple light even though there was no lightsource to be seen. Just black stairs that continues endlessly into the dark.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said, in their true tongue. She’d spoken it. Something in her had remembered...

He took a couple of steps down the stairs.

“Sorry, I didn’t know how else to get you here,” he grumbled. “Just trust us, okay? Just hear us out. We’ve been- we’ve been waiting for you for a long damn time.”