The bow’s been balanced across his knees, propped there with its impossible missing string, but then all of Strange’s intellectual curiosity for that particular puzzle bleeds out as she nicks this new vein. All his focus immediately rewired to the question of rifters, and this sickness.

He had gone reading and digging to hear what the local theories were. Of course he had. Rifters were undoubtedly Fade-touched and there were whispers of their potential similarities to spirits. Which was disconcerting— it was ever so much more soothing to think he’d simply fallen through another hole in the sky, since that was comfortable and even familiar, it followed a set of rules and structures that he knew how to deal with. But rifters being spirits? Some said yes. He tried not to think about the specifics too closely.

His mouth purses, thoughtful. He doesn’t ask Gwenaëlle point-blank, am I even real? but he does say, dryly, “Well, that’s certainly one way to trigger a complete existential crisis, thanks.”

Then, as he tries to picture what she’d described and inevitably pictures something out of Back to the Future: “So it was like they were being erased from this world? Just smudged out of existence?”