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Aloy’s lingering gaze doesn’t pass unnoticed. Talanah smiles at her—such an easy, comfortable thing—and breaks the long crackling-ember silence.
“Looking at this?” She points at a dark freckle near the corner of her nose. The mark stands bold against her skin in the ruddy firelight. “The Sun granted it to me when I was small, and it’s grown with me ever since. Might be funny to say, but—I’m fond of it. All of them, really. Here, watch.”
Slowly, almost reverently, she uses her fingertip to trace a path from memory: a near-perfect triangle of speckles scattered across her cheek, aimed straight at a fourth little dot below the corner of her eye. They’re patterned in a cluster like the stars piercing the clear night sky above them—a new constellation for Aloy to follow and learn.
“Clearly, we can’t all be as Sun-blessed as you are,” Talanah says with the lilt of a laugh. Amber eyes gleaming, she nods at the dense-dusted freckles strewn over the bridge of Aloy’s nose, the arch of her cheekbones, and almost every other place not covered by armor and leather and furs. And then Aloy wonders how Talanah’s same admiring touch might feel all over her own skin—taking her time, thorough, aching, charting every last unexplored point-to-point shape she can find.
The thought of it sparks a shiver from Aloy’s spine to her heart to her hands. Dancing flame-shadows provide cover, but they’re sitting close enough for movements to be sensed.
“No matter how many one has, I think it’s our marks that make us.” Talanah nudges Aloy’s shoulder. “Don’t you?”
After a moment, Aloy makes a soft noise of agreement—throat gone dry, ears burning hotter than their fading campfire, very glad that Talanah didn’t realize she had actually been staring at her lips.