The Great Confluence
Inai has left the telling anyone who listens that the Great Confluence approaches. It has not happened: every line he speaks points forward. What he intends is a gathering of his own kind.
'It is time for the celestials to unite...or fall before me,' he says, and his brothers , , and are the scattered kin those lines summon, each with his own attitude toward the summoner and none yet with a seat. the half-celestial is welcomed to the cause in Inai's own greeting, cousin by Inai's word, though nothing says he will stand at the gathering itself. 's seat is the boldest guess: Inai does not name her among the kin he summons, but her own pledge to stand ready with her master against the upheaval that lies ahead once the Ancient falls, set beside Inai's own word that her true service now comes to pass, suggests a place at the gathering's edge.
Each of them came to this point by a road of his own, and every one of those roads is still being walked.
It has not happened yet. Inai's every word points forward, to a Confluence that approaches, is at hand, and trails its consequences behind it, a gathering that so far exists only as its architect's intention.
