“She was standing in the courtyard when he came through the main gate. He was exactly as she remembered and entirely different — older, greyer, the laugh lines around his eyes replaced by the deeper grooves of sustained grief. His shoulders, which had once seemed to her child-self as wide as the world, were slightly stooped. His Shakti — the power of Death itself — moved around him like a dark tide, controlled but vast, and when he saw her standing in the dawn light with a toddler on her hip and scars on every visible surface of her skin, the tide surged.”