There are a few things she knows about herself. Things which are true. She makes a list of them, in her head, and on the nights when she doesn’t sleep, which is most nights, she repeats them. She imagines painting the words across a wall with her hands, immersed in the familiar scent of a breeze over seawater. She traces the contours of who she is.
When she runs out of words, she searches for the gaps, the cracks in the stone, the negative space in the back of her mind. She searches for anything that could fill it. Something that could just make her self make sense again. But she's looking for answers to questions she can barely see.
All she has are the true things, and what she has is this:
Hers is a small, warm, far-flung planet; a point of light in the glittering weave of astral tapestry. Life has dug its roots into every place from the shallow oceans to the mountaintops. There are so many people who have carved their own homes out of the ruins of civilization rotted away long ago. When one looks out over the forests and the cities, when she extends her perception as far as she can reach, life glows in everything. When it rains, petrichor rises from the earth.
This planet, Alesse, is a sanctuary, alone in endless space. It’s fought a thousand years for its survival. For now, there is peace and Partition, the firmament that holds back the weight of the universe from crashing down.
But every passing day it feels more like everything in the world is holding its breath. Like they are all living on stolen time. Before she woke up here, her world was so much smaller than Alesse; she still can’t say what it was, or why, but it was home. All of that is gone now.
She's seen a firmament shatter to pieces and fall once before.
Beyond the horizon lies the insurmountable adversary– the monstrous, universe-spanning empires that have tried before, in a time remembered by six people and six people only, to grind everything into dust, whose countless eyes are still watching. Waiting.
So many stories are buried with the people who witnessed them. The remains have been reduced by time to legends of war, devourers, ash-black skies, of orbital instruments of death that incinerated continents, of immortal god-emperors who ripped each other apart over whatever it was that made Alesse their battleground. And there are legends of the Sun Queen, the lone victor, who enveloped the planet in her protection and disappeared into history.
The scars left behind by the Ash Lords have not healed, and they never will.
Perhaps the rest, though, are still just beyond the Partition, searching for a way to take it. Hammering against the sky and hoping to split it at the seams.
And they are not the only monsters out there. She feels the rot seeping through the cracks, and she knows she's not alone. It's a shadow that seems to follow her at the furthest edge of her consciousness, reaching into Alesse from the deepest abyss of space and spreading ever so slowly, screaming through body and soul. Once, in someone else's dream, flooded with its presence, she saw it. It showed her her own face.
Did she speak with it, then? Is it watching? Is it listening?
It would be difficult for anyone to fathom how deeply the decaying foundations spread beneath the surface of Alesse, how deeply the abyss descends, killing from the inside out. They're all surrounded by it, after all, inundated with it. It feels so vast that it must be incomprehensible.
Alesse might survive another millennium yet. Or it might be a century, or a decade, or a year, and then it will be over.
She's lived a dozen mortal lifetimes, alone on this planet. In all that time she has seen nothing of it.
But there are things about herself she knows.
She likes the rain, and the food, and the endless, staggering vistas.
She likes watching the animals outside her windows, birds and crawling things flitting across the city streets, even if she's afraid of approaching them. She likes watching the people more, although those fears are more complicated.
Writing out her thoughts still helps her to order them, to feel calm, and sound, even without the walls of the vast, ancient library that were once her canvas.
She used to read and reread every story recorded there; some that she now knows to have been about the world that was going by without her, some that were not. Some that she wrote herself. Their escapism may have lost its colour, but her memories of them still ground her. Memories of true things and of fantasies. Botanical journals and adventurers' odysseys. Love stories.
She's never been in love.
But against all odds there are people in whose hands she’s placed her trust. Valerie, Marcel and the Court of Solace, who have harboured her, protected her, searched with her for answers. River Mercier, the first person she ever met to understand her. To make her feel safe.
She’s hurt people before, and she doesn’t know if she will again. Inexplicably it terrifies her. Even the ones she doesn’t know, who she never imagined existed. They have to matter.
At times it still seems unreal, as if everyone, all the twinkling lights around her, are shining through stuff as thin as paper. Dreams pulled from her head. Or maybe it's that she is the unreal one, in someone else's dream; a paper-cutout ghost of her own life, never meant to be, its welcome overstayed.
There is a gulf between her and them. She too is immortal, after all, a shadow cast across time by the past she does not remember. Bound by fate and untethered from the earth. Since the time of old, dead gods, so many have fought for so much longer to change the world, and the rot is still here.
But the lights are still burning too, and they are alive, now, and she believes they matter. She has to.
Adeline Elanora used to believe that she knew who she was, and then everything she knew to be true was gone in a blinding flash, and all of a sudden she didn't. Home is gone, and it's never coming back.
All that's left is Alesse and her people.
And she has no idea how she’s going to save them.
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