Sitting in the meditation room, Kishirra took a few moments to look at the Sunseeker as he digested her tale. She saw him shake his head and mumble a few prayers.

“Toys, then,” he said at last. “Or perhaps something more akin to pets. Like cattle you can converse with. Is this what you are telling me? Is this the origin and purpose of Elves?”

Kishirra nodded, running her dark fingers against the shifting sand.

“It surely used to be for our old masters. They built us in their image, more resistant and tougher than they.”

“And more long-lived.”

Kishirra winced.

“Not exactly.” She stood up. “It is almost time for my trial. I will have to explain this part as we walk.”

+++

Weeks and month ran by like water running on marble. Kishirra did get used to her life in the Garden after all, and more easily than she believed. She did strike up a few thin friendships, but she spent most of her time with her brother and another female Elf who Mistress had purchased after her, adding it to her family as a sister. The three of them sat beneath the red-fruited tree and enjoyed the warm rays of the morning.

Kishirra looked up at the clear sky, the endless, perfect blue reaching all the way up to the infinite beyond. The Hearthwomb had added no specific information on the sky, maybe because after all she was not required to know anything beyond the fact it was there, and even though she liked the Garden, a small part of her did crave to know a little more about it.

With her appointed sister asleep on her lap, Kishirra raised her hand to cover the sun, letting its rays play between her fingers.

It had been some time since she had spoken with Mistress. She had seemed troubled the last few times she had seen here.

She would have liked to help her. But what could she do? She was just an Elf and Mistress was— she was Kiengiri.

“She seemed troubled.”

Gam’mu picked up on her expression and turned to look at her, a warm arm holding her shoulders.

“Mistress will be fine. Her troubles are beyond our abilities to care. Besides…”

Kishirra was not listening anymore. She turned her eye to the west.

What was there? The dawn? But it couldn’t be…

Gam’mu noticed it as well he turned towards the growing light in the west.

“What’s that?” He gaped as it grew brighter and brighter, eating through the sky with its golden hue, then to a feverish white that pierced Kishirra’s retinas.

She lost her ability to speak as the liquid dawn crashed onto the city, turning the air into fire, stone to slab and bones to memory.

+++

Kishirra leaned against the doorway. The sensation of the cold stone felt comforting. She was not there anymore. She was here, now. With the Sunseeker and Ansàrra to guard her soul.

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“It was like stepping into a pool of liquid heat. The Garden was destroyed in an instant, as were most of the smallest and narrowest towers.” Her hand rubbed the black stone of the palace. “It was the same as this, the glasstone of Sabgisu.”

The Sunseeker sighed, touching the stone as well.

“You could take a slab of black glasstone as thin as a nail, hammer at it with a mallet for a hundred years and it would not even chip. That was— you lived through the Epochalypse, didn’t you?”

“I did not have a chance to give it a name,” Kishirra mused, her lips turning into a wry smile. “And I did not live through it at all. My body is very resilient, but not nearly as much as glasstone. I was vaporised before I could understand what was going on, before I could say goodbye to Mistress, or to my brother and sister.” She paused, as if trying to catch fragments of thoughts that were supposed to be long gone. “I think the first to go was my skin, then my flesh, and my bones — turned to mist. The heat ate through the stone next, cooking and boiling. It did not stop — the towers, one after another, melted and fell. Only a few of them still stood. And nobody remembers what they used to be… the glory and pride of the Kiengiri people.”

“And yet you are here,” the Sunseeker stated.

“Ah, yes.” Kishirra took a step out of the door towards the open corridor that would leave to the room for her Trial. “That was also part of the lie. You see, I was brought back.”

+++

Night came, but only in the sky. The valley of Kìtum, where Kishirra and the Garden and Mistress Ereshkigalla once stood now reduced to a molten sea of glowing rock. The drunken towers lay against each other, most of them broken, some still standing, if only because they held onto each other, the majority reduced to a slab of geometric memories, slowly cooling down. The blackstone that no storm could weather down, that would be standing a thousand’s thousand years had bowed before the localised dawn like blades of glass before a gale.

The air itself broiled with vapour and hissed with the noxious air of the shattered earth as it released its breath from its broken intestines. Old-fashioned molten rock, the kind that would be found in volcanic areas, spewed from the fissures, spreading far and away. Winds picked up pace as the air cooled and fought against each other, carried not just by the destruction but by the lingering effects of the Kiengiri’s dominion, on a day that would have been their last.

And in the sky there was something new as well: a huge glowing arc spread throughout the entirety of the cosmos, blinding the stars with its brightness. It was still diffused and chaotic but it was already starting to take a definite shape, a sickle that was bright enough to cast shadows throughout the destroyed valley.

Then dawn came, the usual, calm and gentle kind. Not a shadow moved in the Kìtum that was not more molten rock of clouds of hissing vapours. Everything that once lived had been turned to little more than its own shadow, and then the surface that shadow rested had been vaporised or melted.

So, for many long days and nights, as the Kìtum fell into an uneasy stillness, as the molten rock of the violated earth returned to its bowels and the clashing winds found a definite pattern to resolve their contentions, carrying the noxious echoes of the lost civilisation, nothing moved in the valley.

And then, one night, when the clouds had mostly parted, under the shade of one of the leaning needle-like towers something stirred. Bit by bit, strings of flesh and sinew, drops of ichor and bands of muscles gathered together, like rivers in a basin. Bit by painful bit the layers of dark skin knit with each other, and with those came a fuzz of blonde hair, teeth grew and affixed themselves to a mouth as the skull found its place, restoring the visage of lost Kiengiri, a gorgeous woman with slightly-pointed ears.

Her eyes opened, and the lingering soul that was trying to fold itself into a new body looked up at the violated world, and a gurgle escaped her chapped lips. Her grey eyes fixated on the arc of glowing light, and feverishly looked around, searching for — Mistress — but as they did the noxious gas from the Kìtum choked her breath with their poisonous fumes.

The head fought for a while against the poison, spitting white foam as pain ran like a storm throughout all of its nerves, as Kishirra’s soul, nailed to the earth like a blackstone coffin, fought valiantly for a body that could withstand the torture of the destroyed Kìtum.

Sometimes she screamed, sometimes she gurgled, and she kept searching for — Mistress — until her eyes burned themselves blind from the gases and they popped and ran down her cheeks like a pair of final tears. She kept murmuring her name with her swollen tongue until it fell still against her throat and it suffocated her.

She kept trashing and shuddering until her soul lost all of its gathered strength and was forced, for the time being, to leave her body.

Everything considered, it took her half a day to die a second time.