“Cliopher had not been right, after all, about what fanoa meant.
Not right at all.
He felt sick with loss, as if his heart had been pierced and all his wistful dreams had gushed out of it, disappearing into the sand below their feet.
It did not matter, Cliopher told himself fiercely, that they were lovers as well as friends. They could still be the greatest of friends. They could still be fanoa, reaching across cultures and across oceans and even across the divide between the human worlds and Sky Ocean, the realms of the gods.
And yet-
People understood the idea that a lover might follow his beloved anywhere. It had always been a strange and difficult idea that one might love a friend that deeply.
That was how people always talked about romantic, sexual love. As if that sort of love was necessarily better, greater, more, than friendship. As if being the greatest of friends was a step down.
It had always been so important to Cliopher that Elonoa'a and Aurelius Magnus were celebrated for their great friendship, and that no one had ever hinted at that sort of romance. Even for the Islanders there were many stories of lovers loving that profoundly... and there was this one story of the greatest of friends, the human iteration of Ani and Vou'a's friendship.
Cliopher had never thought it was a step down.
He had wanted-”