Goodness did not arrive the way order had - considered, precise, fully formed in its own understanding. Nor did it arrive the way chaos had - bitter and grasping and already reaching for something to resent. Goodness arrived the way light arrives: without announcement, without intention, simply filling the space available to it and asking nothing in return.

Indrael opened his eyes, and the first thing he did was look at everything.

Not to assess it, not to categorise it or find his place within it. He looked because it was there, and it was extraordinary, and he could not imagine why anyone with eyes would do anything other than look at it. He saw his mother Myria in her ceaseless work and felt something warm move through him. He saw Arethea moving through creation like a quiet tide, shoring up what would otherwise be lost, and felt it again. He even looked at Nos - moving through the dark at the edge of things, pulling at threads - and felt it, reluctantly, unmistakably, again. He did not yet have a name for what he felt. That would come in time.

He was woven from a spark of Myria, as all her stewards were, but where Arethea had received from her the cold clarity of correction, Indrael had received something else - the part of his mother that created not out of compulsion or strategy but out of sheer, overwhelming care. The part of her that made things because she wanted them to exist. Because a universe with them in it was better than one without. That was the fragment Indrael carried, and it burned in him like a coal that never cooled.

He moved through creation differently to his siblings. Where Rathkealon swept through things and left them looser, and Arethea touched things and left them firmer, Indrael moved through creation and left it warmer. The things he passed near grew, not in the frenzied overflowing way of Myria's first chaotic burst, but steadily, quietly, as though remembering something they had always meant to become. He did not direct this. He did not plan it. He simply was what he was, and proximity to him had consequences.

He found that he loved his siblings - all of them, without reservation or condition, which caused him no end of complicated feeling. He loved Arethea's steadfastness and found in him a counterpart who could give permanent shape to the warmth Indrael trailed through creation. Together they made things that were both strong and good, and those things lasted. He loved Rathkealon too, even knowing what she did, and would sometimes follow in her wake and coax back from the edge of entropy those things she had loosened that had not yet found Nos. He could not save everything. He saved what he could. The rest he grieved, briefly and privately, before moving on.

When Malice came - as Indrael had, somehow, always known Malice would - Indrael did not recoil. He looked at his dark sibling with the same open, searching attention he had given everything else. What he found there troubled him. Not because Malice was beyond understanding, but because Indrael understood perfectly, and understanding did not resolve the ache of it.

He chose, in the end, to love Malice too. Not to trust, not to agree, not to follow. But to love, in the way that one loves the night for making the dawn possible. It was the most painful thing he had ever done and he would not have undone it for anything.

In the great dance of making and unmaking, Indrael threads himself through creation like light through cracked stone - finding every gap, illuminating every hollow, touching everything he can reach and leaving it, however briefly, better than he found it. He asks for nothing. He keeps no record. He simply moves through the cosmos like a rumour of warmth, and where he has been, things bloom.

Nos will reach those things eventually. Indrael has always known this. He weaves anyway.