It wasn't metal. Inspection proved it was more like shell, grown up around a living thing, with a blackly pearlescent sheen on the inside of the plates. And as soon as he began to put them on, they became his skin.

New senses flowered in him slowly. He could feel the weight of dustmotes whirling in a corner. The tread of feet through some knobby Dorchadan forest leagues away like a prickle at his shoulder. Sleeting rain falling on the healing ruin of Caer Scima like the twinge of some scabbed-over wound deep in his chest. And like a spider at the center of some unknowable web, he felt in faint twitches, uncanny knowing that curled through his mind like mist, the doings of Unseelie shardbearers. Breaths taken in sleep. Eyes aching pouring over books. The sweat and heat of copulation, the strain of panic, and if he focused just enough he could feel himself in their skin.

Until all that remained was the helm, seemingly lifeless, staring him down. Daring him, almost, to become an arbiter of the wrath of Dorchadas.