Buddy reaches for the nearest ear, carefully. He expects the leaves to be sharp. He is prepared to bleed. And instead the leaves (greener than any green he's ever seen before) bend away obligingly to reveal pale yellow-green kernels.

It's not ripe.

It's not ripe and Helio is not here and standing alone in this silent endless cornfield, Buddy Dawn allows himself a moment of an emotion he never would have indulged on Spyre. He doubts. And in that moment a gentle breeze blows through the corn stalks, cool and inviting. The stalks rustle softly. The heat of the sun lifts from his skin.

And in this ethereal cornfield outside of time and space he has the sudden feeling that it's just before midday, that the sun is high, that he could (if he so chose) walk towards the east and the sun would follow along with him towards sunrise. Towards the dawn. It's what his faith would tell him to do. It's what he was named for.

Or... he could walk a different path. An uncertain one. Perhaps a harder one. Helio is not here and Helio cannot tell him the answer and while clocks continue to tick and time continues to flow in the mortal realm, here in the infinite cornfield Buddy Dawn has nothing but time.

So Buddy sits down in a quiet shade that wasn't there before and thinks. After all-- perhaps there isn't so much daylight between the twilight and the dawn.