Kishirra walked forward on the corridor, the Sunseeker easily keeping pace with her. As they left the meditation area, the blackstone architecture of the palace widened, opening in tall arches and windows which let more sunlight peek through in veils and glistening rays. More devotees of Ansàrra passed by, throwing an odd glance at the presence of the Elf and a respectful nod at the Sunseeker, who mostly ignored them. He was focused on Kishirra and she felt his blind gaze on her as they reached a round balcony that gave on to the open air.

“I needed to take a breath,” she explained herself, leaning against the balcony and looking down at the verdant hills and open plains of the Holy Land. The wind picked up and played with her hair, shifting them back and forth like a sea of gold. Beneath them, the lower layers of the palace also moved against the wind, the gardens and pools and squares full of people from the lowest servant to the highest-ranked Sunseeker going to their business, and below still, a thousand paces beneath, the tips of the trees waved back and forth caressed by the air.

The floating palace was now headed towards the shore. They had caressed the tips of the mountain and, in an opposite movement to the Sun’s own direction, it was now headed back towards the east and the ocean, and the white-walled cities of Ansàrra’s inner domain.

In that direction the silver arc that cut through the sky could be clearly seen. She had been there when it had been made.

She had been lucky enough to reach the Holy Land. Blessed enough to be here, where she could breathe clear air. Behind her, the range of snow-tipped mountains extended like a shield. She and the Sunseeker turned to regard it. Imposing, taller than the clouds, it proceeded for miles and miles in the inner parts of the continent, past the wilderlands, protecting the Holy Land from the evil winds and poisonous emanations of the destroyed territory that laid behind.

“I consider this my third life,” Kishirra explained the holy man. “I have started to count them as lives since the day my body got resistant enough to survive inside the ruins of the Kìtum. Everything else was just…” she shrugged. “Another cycle, I suppose. You see, when the Kiengiri made us, they tried to do something with our souls. To our souls. I am not sure. We figured it out in due time. We keep folding again and again. Something in our souls remembers our shape, like an old sheet of reedpaper folded time and time again. We continue, we keep reforming, we come back.”

“I fail to see the lie, then,” the Sunseeker sighed. “In truth, you are saying exactly what I had expected. That Elves are removed from death altogether, and they keep coming back each time. How is that not immortality? How is that not—”

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“Think… of the folded sheet, Master,” Kishirra interrupted him, something that would have had her whipped, but the old man just let her continue, “it gets folded again and again, but what happens to the reed paper? How many times can you keep…” she mimed the motions with her hands, ever faster and more frantically, “… can you keep twisting and bending the paper before all its fibres grow weak and tired? And how many times can you do it until it’s just pain and pain and memories of sorrow? Until it rips apart?” Her hands fell to her sides. “I am going to finish my story soon, but please let’s go to the vestibule first. I want to tell you everything before I get ready for the Trial.”

“Let us do that. So you can tell me how you find out about all this.”

“It wasn’t me. It was thanks to my brother,” she sighed. “What my brother has become.”

+++

It lasted for a day, and it lasted for a month, and it lasted for a season.

It lasted for fourteen years.

In a secluded place in the valley of Kìtum, amidst the destroyed towers, a mass of burnt skin and flesh would gather, try to take form. It would open its eyes to the immensity of the sky above, to the tarnished firmament that still oozed silver light from its arced wound.

Then the poisons and heat from the air and destroyed soil would seep in, and the mass of skin and flesh would gurgle and scream and die, dissolve into the earth from where it came.

The same mass would come back, growing from the memory nailed into reality by a disappeared people that had been burned to nothingness, but whose actions still echoed into her soul.

And like a trapped echo at the bottom of a well, it would keep repeating, each time into a maddening cycle.

Again and again, as punctual as the seasons.

If outside the Kìtum snow fell, the mass would grow at the shade of the collapsed towers.

And it would die.

If flowers bloomed, it would swell in a vitrified crater on the ground.

And it would wither.

If summer grew gifs, it would appear again under a fragment of molten wall.

And it would burst into charred flesh.

If autumn carried leaves in the wind, it would surface between sharp fissures, looking up at the tarnished sky.

And the cycle would repeat, each time a little faster, each time a little stronger.

Bit by bit, a hint of arms and legs would grow.

Over the next cycle, more skin would come, better suited to the supremely-hostile environment of the blasted land.

And on the fourteenth year after the all-destroying dawn had come to the valley of Kìtum, a naked body of a sable-skinned woman, with long blonde hair and red-tinged eyes would sit up, choking golden ichor from her lips, coughing and shuddering, breathing in poisonous air which burned through her lungs and made her heart feel like it was beating through nails, but she would be alive and she would stay alive.

At least for a while.

Pearled with sweat and dirt and abhorrent cinder her face would frown as she lifted her eyes to destroyed towers, trying to see which one used to house her Garden, and her family and most importantly her—

“Mistress?” She called.

No answer came with the dead wind.