This is true. It turned out that Corino didn't need to go all the way to Suranse to get his wings; Dawn-shining's Sphere was close enough.

The wings are cloud-white with sky-blue accents, huge and feathered like Dawn-shining's. They're absolutely beautiful.

Nezhefena's wings are also feathered, but sleek rather than fluffy, and black as shadows. She looks quietly pleased with them.

Aeleva's wings are not at all the colour of her soul; they're pure silver, more a bat's than a bird's although the structure isn't quite right for either.

And Summer-blue's wings are much like Dawn-shining's, but the colours are different. Predominantly blue, with gold and silver highlights.

"...So," says Elaneth-imire, "I want to make some kind of sane portal hub structure in this world, so people who want a portal between their Sphere and Nuime can have them organized. I'm thinking near the capital. I'm also thinking on the moon, for people who want their portals only accessible via teleportation."

"Go right ahead and put a portal hub on the moon. I wouldn't dream of stopping you."

He puts a portal hub on the moon. He installs appropriate air recycling systems and so forth. He comes back.

"Who wants a moon portal?"

They all want moon portals. Pop, now they're on the moon. The view is stunning; he made the ceiling transparent.

As each person puts up their portal in one of the provided archways, he reshapes the stone of the arch to write their name on it.

"Do you want a moon portal of your very own?"

"Yeah, I think I do."

He makes one.

"Okay. I'm... going to find Raika-seren and tell him to pop into my Sphere and think of Atialemain. Yes, that's a reasonable next step. Wow this has sure been a day."

"Do you need to take a minute?"

"I cannot take a minute."

He nods. "All right, go on."

Back to Raika-seren. Dump updated memories on Raika-seren.

Well, you've been busy. ...You'll need somewhere with air to put the portal.

I'll conjure you a space station.

He conjures a space station around them. He puts a portal to his Sphere in it.

He pops to the other side, expecting all of his eavesdropping to suddenly go dead...

...and that does not happen.

Okay that's convenient but first: he thinks of Atialemain, and feels accomplished, and the feeling fills him up and shines out in a column of bright white light—and he has his wings. They're built in the Taliar style, big and feathered and fluffy. But the feathers are predominantly black, edged in blue and silver and gold. The colours shift and shimmer as he moves.

"You win. That's the most utterly stunning pair of wings I've seen today."

He beams.

"Okay but more importantly you don't have anything better to do so go figure out what the deal is with Spheres and osanwe. Is it because I'm close to the door, is it because your Sphere is 'living', I don't know, figure it out."

"On it!"

Father?

Yes?

Osanwe works inconsistently across Sphere portals and I want to find out what the fuck. Help?

Sure.

He brings Nezhefena into it, since otherwise the experiments might be tainted by Elaneth-imire's ability to consistently reach his father's mind from an adjacent world. They string all their Spheres together and open and close various portals and have Dawn-shining and Nezhefena stand in various locations.

The conclusion seems to be: if a living Sphere has an open portal to another world, it can count as 'part of' that world for osanwe purposes if the Sphere's owner wants it to. This effect can extend all the way across at least the three available Spheres if all the owners are cooperative.

They experiment with teleportation. The conclusions are similar: link two worlds with a chain of cooperative living Spheres, and you can hop straight from one to the other. Close any of the intervening portals, or have one of the intervening Spheres stop cooperating, and it stops working. You can still teleport into an uncooperative Sphere from any Sphere or world that has an open portal to it, but the portals behave like adjacencies at that point, you can't pass through it like it's all part of the same contiguous space.

This is going to be very useful.

Isn't it though?

He updates Raika-seren on their conclusions.

Who has the prettiest wings? Raika-seren Taliar has the prettiest wings. It's him. He does. They are so gorgeous.

He kind of wants to see what his Sphere looks like, but he's busy right now, he doesn't want to spare the attention away from eavesdropping to fuck around with making portals. That stuff about how living Spheres interact with adjacency is amazing, though. Also, his wings are the prettiest. Although Elaneth-imire's are admittedly a close second.

And portals are unspeakably game-changing, though I'd be more excited about them if my people hadn't just all been murdered. And only one of them came out of it with compensatory pretty wings.