It's like stepping through a door into a dream. One moment she is running, suffocating and trapped, and then her hand pushes through a portal and she is tumbling into a space so open and strange she should want a ship to navigate it. Tellus would call it a crime to waste this much area and material. For XIII, it's a miracle.

She sits down next to the river, in a spot just cleaned by the ghost maiden. She does not stop to watch her work, or wonder why she does. These acts are not a mystery to a palace servitor, especially when compared with the freely rushing water. This too would not be allowed on Tellus. Nero would never permit a river to exist inside her paradise. Where it must run, let it do so in rigid channels, pumped slowly forward at pre-approved speeds. But this is... fast. Wild, inconsistent even. It churns itself into a frothy white mess where two or more currents smash into each other, and it runs so slowly that it almost seems to sit still near the turn on the bank. It moves as it will, on a path it carved for itself, perhaps on the whim of some bored, drunken God but certainly not by the design of any mortal architect.

She is enraptured. She watches it flow past her from her perch with an intense expression carved onto her face, not curious or angry or afraid, not peaceful or happy or contemplative. She watch the water, each fleck of white drifting next to her seat and then disappearing under the bridge and around the bend, with the same look she used to get when she watched her princess preparing for an athletic contest. And for once not a single thought catches inside her brain.

An hour passes her by with only the sounds of the city for company. If you can actually call it that. The river bubbles, the wind rustles through grass and stone. Glass crunches and scrapes across the ground at odd intervals without ever really drawing farther away, as if to prove the pointlessness of the woman's task. Maybe once or twice a minute there'll be the whisper-brushing that passes for Azurite walking as some citizen or another crosses the street. It's quiet the way a dream is quiet. It's closer to the Yakanov than it is to even the Imperial Palace, let alone the reaches of the city-planet itself. There are no wailing songs fighting each other for dominance, no whirling and clicking of great and constantly operating mechanisms or tired grunts and heavy, many-tiered footfalls from people with places to be and work to be done at every hour of the day. A city should be thriving, teaming, [I]writhing[/I], so full and loud that it gave her a headache if she tried to listen to it all at once for more than a moment. And this is... not. It's like if someone tried to build a model of one inside her-- i-inside the Anemoi.

She stands as if jolted by the spark of a personal ELF. She whips her head about to look for Apollo an his smug, insufferable smile, but of course the god is not here with her. His interest was only to lead her here to this broken place; now that she was here he had no further use for her. Typical. Heat rises in her cheeks and her ears flutter in a very definitely pouting way. Moron. He was there, what the shit made you think that meant he cared? How often had the gods proved she was beneath their pity? If Hera would not visit her, then...

Suddenly her feet can't carry her fast enough. She doesn't challenge the bridge, but she cuts through streets and people's paths with reckless urgency until the smell of baking bread pulls her short. She takes deep sniffs of the air. It's warm and hearty and full of life in a way that makes her chest tingle. She sniffs again as she approaches. They use a different grain here, or they grow it in some weird new way (probably with djinn dust and enough terrifyingly casual power to make her stomach churn). It's flaxen and bright where it should be earthy, and filled with all sorts of extra things that make a proper city's worth of noise for her nose to make sense of.

She reaches the bakery and watches the armored woman inside work with the same kind of mesmerized expression the river had given her. Things were different here indeed. This bread was dark brown where her own was golden, and baked in rounded tins where XIII had been taught to shape it into bars by hand. But what set this place apart more than the basics, more than the loneliness that stabbed through it all, more even than the pointlessly huge quantity (how could so much of something even exist? Was this tribute for... but no, Thist said they didn't do that. So then how? How could anybody have so much more of something than they needed and still look so drab and ignoble?), was the variety. There were playing breads and unleavened ones, ones baked with strawberry cream and ones crammed so full of vegetables that the crust had turned orange-green. There were small ones and large ones and ones cut into the shape of leaves, and more entrancingly still several attempts to replicate the structure of their weird spiral-circle patterns that gave the Endless Azure Skies a majesty she couldn't brush off no matter how much she tried to assure herself that this was a broken place after all.

The baker moves with the kind of stately purpose she would expect of a high priestess. She gestures, and huge trays of uncooked doughs lift themselves atop a storm dust into grand stone ovens with heating elements so deep inside them XIII can't see how they manage it here. The baker/priestess turns her attention to more finished loaves, her body twisting like a dancer as the trays move to her will and rhythm over to teeming, empty racks to cool. Her every move is purposeful. No action is wasted. No words are necessary. This is the work of a master. This is the highest form of artistry. This is a palace, a theater, a temple, whether the Azurites would call it such or no.

She makes no notice of XIII no matter how obviously she watches or creeps closer. Not until her bag of coins starts jangling does she get a sharp stare and a nod of acknowledgement. Neither of them comments on how long the other has been there. The entire transaction takes place in total silence. XIII purchases a large dome of bread still shimmering with heat and stuffed so full of melted cheeses it makes her palms feel greasy just to look at it. She fishes coins out clumsily, one at a time with an uncertain glance up after each until she finally gets a shrug and a hand wave. She leaves with the distinct impression she's been ripped off.

The bread is warm in her hands as she leaves, even through the paper bag it's been wrapped in. XIII carves a careful chunk from it as she walks and pops it into her mouth. Instantly she realizes her doom. She could never manage flavor like this. She could study for years and not achieve this texture. It chews and it melts somehow at the same time,and the burst of sweet and salty flavor rains down her throat without mercy. She has never been permitted this kind of decadence. This is art. It is an act of worship that she's eating. This is a miracle, born out of a broken planet that wouldn't understand the uselessness of continuing to move forward through the ashes of its own corpse.

She climbs to the top of a building from the outside, picking her way up the masonry and around the hanging tapestry with it's unknowable circle patterns so she can find a safe nest among the tilted roofs. Her tail swishes solemnly behind her while her bread burns her lap, and she watches the sky through the shapes of the distant towers, and the brilliant violet glow that burns them all.