Tao paid no mind to any of this. In the vast nothingness that surrounded her, she searched again for what she had always sought to avoid: the heaviest threads of fate, thick and unbending; the loci of these threads that dragged like anchors at her mind. This time, she found them. She groped among them for a sense of conflict—of battle, of blood, of empires risen and fallen. One called to her like a summons—a clarion call, a battle cry, a howl—and she obeyed. She fought to allow herself to fall into its gravity—an effortful release—and at last, she saw, with blind eyes:
