She has kept her silence for quite some while, knowing that the pace of time that passes between Twin Peaks and Milliways, and between Milliways and the world of her birth, is slowed and slowed again by factors she cannot explain. Still, it is no small gift, in that it grants her space in which to think and plan.

The Aes Sedai has used that time to study her options and the prophecies of the Karatheon Cycle, to dwell on the sound of the wind at night and her restless unease with every dawn. She has mulled over what Nynaeve had told her, and all the possibilities that the apocalypse at the bar at the end of all worlds may now have brought upon them.

("I cannot go back without undoing what was done. Can I?"

"That, I think, is mostly a question of how far back, yes? Or possibly it is a different kind of forward.")



There are other considerations to be taken into account, as it happens.

Dinner has become a habit for them, now, at least once or twice every week. It is her turn to host tonight, in the little house that she had begun to call her own. Moiraine has come to believe that she will always prefer tea, but she has developed something of a fondness for coffee all the same, and has been trying her hand at new ways of brewing it for these occasions.

The French press stands before her now on the countertop, and she slants a sideways look at him as she reaches for the canister that holds the coffee.