POV - Morgana
This time the memories came as a song, a long and continuous melody, where each note was a year and each chord an entire life being built before me. And I did not pass through them as I had the others. I listened. As one who closes their eyes and lets the music tell the story by itself.
Years. Years passing like light that shifts its angle through the length of a day, the same landscape, the same two women, but the quality of the light between them transforming slowly, so slowly that only those who observe from the outside notice what was once shadow has become warmth.
And each memory that passed held something in common: it had been chosen. Preserved. Kept with the care of one who knows that time carries everything away and decides, before it does, what deserves to remain. My daughter, who had lived millennia and accumulated more memories than any mind ought to contain, had chosen these. And for someone who rarely kept anything, that choice was, in itself, a declaration.
Instruments on the veranda. Two guzhengs side by side, four hands upon the strings, two melodies meeting and weaving together like climbing vines growing against the same wall. Azra'il missing a note. Anastasia correcting her without looking. Azra'il repeating until she got it right. And in the getting it right, the sound of them both together, imperfect, beautiful in a way that perfection cannot reach, because there was in that music the texture of something built by two pairs of hands, with mistakes and patience and the stubbornness of those who refuse to give up.
Snow. A white field stretching as far as the eye could follow, and in the midst of it, Anastasia carving a path through a storm of violet lightning that turned the snow around her to vapour. Azra'il appearing just behind, laughing, two swords dancing in her hands like extensions of her arms, as though combat were a language the body spoke without requiring translation. And behind them, the enemy who no longer mattered, because what I saw was not the battle. It was the synchrony. The way one advanced and the other covered. As though they had rehearsed it across lifetimes, and perhaps they had, in their own fashion.
Now, a night market. Lanterns floating above stalls of spices and fabric, the air smelling of cinnamon and evening. Azra'il haggling with a merchant with the excessive enthusiasm of someone who turned every negotiation into a personal sport. Anastasia behind her, arms folded, murmuring that this was beneath the dignity of a cultivator of her standing. Azra'il solemnly ignoring her. Anastasia buying the item afterwards when Azra'il wasn't looking.
An ancient temple. Stone pillars draped in moss. The two of them fighting side by side against three masters of a rival sect, and in the midst of the chaos, amidst blades and lightning and crumbling stone, Azra'il saying something that made Anastasia roll her eyes so fiercely I almost felt the movement. And even so, on the very next exchange, Anastasia turned and covered Azra'il's back without a single word needing to pass between them. The language of two bodies that had learnt to trust each other more than any technique.
And then, slower, sharper, as though the song had found its refrain, came the memories that shone more brightly than the rest.
The promise kept.
Azra'il on the veranda. The guzheng in her lap. Her fingers tracing the strings from beginning to end of a piece, whole, without error, without musical catastrophe, without any of the acoustic disasters that had marked the first months. And Anastasia listening. Her face unreadable. Her hands folded in her lap. And when the last note dissolved into the air, she did not applaud, did not praise, said nothing for a long moment. She simply rose. Sat beside Azra'il. And sang.
I did not hear the song in this flash, it passed too quickly. But I saw my daughter's face as she listened. And what I saw there was something I kept with the care of one who guards a jewel without a safe: the face of someone hearing, for the first time in their life, something they had not known they needed to hear.
The first kiss.
It came like lightning, swift, without warning. Azra'il had said something. I do not know what, the memory passed too fast. But whatever the words had been, they were enough for Anastasia, the proudest woman I had ever observed, to seize the collar of Azra'il's hanfu, pull, and kiss her.
And then turn her face away immediately, as though what had just occurred had been a perfectly logical, administrative decision.
The violet static that habitually surrounded Anastasia, the constant energy I had learnt to read as a diary of her emotions, was entirely absent. For the first time. As though her body had decided that, in that instant, there was nothing left to defend itself against.
An ordinary morning. In the room that was now theirs, two impressions in the same bedding. A mantle drawn over two pairs of shoulders. The light of dawn coming in through the window and illuminating the space between two bodies, which was not great, which was not distance, which was simply the space that two people leave between themselves when they no longer need to prove anything and can simply exist.
I do not describe what is not mine to describe. But I saw the aftermath. The peace. The trust of skin against skin. The vulnerability of sleeping beside someone and waking still wishing to be there.
The veranda of the house. Late afternoon. Azra'il dozing in a chair, a book open in her lap, one ear drooping and the other upright in the position that meant light sleep, the sort of rest that any sound would break. And Anastasia appeared from the corridor without making a noise. She looked at the woman sleeping, who was murmuring something unintelligible between dream and waking. She took a mantle from the back of another chair and placed it over Azra'il's shoulders with a tenderness that made her sword strikes seem rough by comparison. She arranged the fabric across those shoulders. And left as she had come, in silence, without waiting for gratitude, not knowing she was seen.
But she was.
Because the moment Anastasia's footsteps disappeared into the corridor, Azra'il opened one eye. Slowly. She looked in the direction the other had gone, the empty hallway, the sound of those steps already dying in the distance. Then she looked down, at the mantle over her own shoulders. Her fingers touched the fabric.
And she smiled.
The sort of smile we keep for when no one is watching, small, unguarded, honest in a way she rarely permitted herself to be. The smile of someone who has been cared for and knows the worth of it, and knows also that the person who cared would never admit to having done so.
And I thought, with the tenderness of one who has learnt that love reveals itself most in what we do when no one is watching rather than in any declaration: 'Anastasia tends without witness. And Azra'il keeps the gesture without telling.' Two forms of love that never require an audience.
And at some point between those memories, the change happened the way real changes do, not with a thunderclap, but with the naturalness of a season turning. Certain words shifted. "The house" became "our house." There was no announcement. No formal declaration. But I heard Azra'il call her "my wife" with a naturalness that likely set sparks off in Anastasia on principle, and I watched Anastasia not correct her, which, coming from her, was the most eloquent confirmation that existed.
And I, between one memory and the next, understood something about my daughter that perhaps I had not understood before.
Azra'il had lived many lives. She had traversed worlds. She had known people who loved her and people who despised her and people who had done both at once. And across all those lives, memories had accumulated like sand, so much that no vessel is large enough to hold it all. But these memories had been kept in a different place. Not in the vast and chaotic store where the rest piled up. In a smaller place. More sheltered. The place where we keep the things that, if we were to lose them, we would lose a part of ourselves.
Azra'il had chosen to keep Anastasia there.
And that said everything.
Then the memories slowed. The song found its final note. Time returned to the pace of one who breathes.
And something was different.
I felt it before I saw it. Before the scene took shape, before the light found form and the space gained contour, what I felt made me recoil inwardly, as though I had touched something I ought not to touch.
Absence.
Not the emptiness I had sensed in the training courtyard, several memories back, that tremor in perception, that hesitation within the memory itself. This was different. Deeper. More wrong. As though something in the fabric of that memory had been removed, and the space around it did not know how to fill what was missing. It was not the cold of emptiness. It was something that came before cold, the absence of the very possibility of cold, the removal of the idea of temperature altogether.
I was acquainted with unsettling sensations. In Runeterra, when I had learnt of the Watchers, those entities of the Void that fed upon reality, something similar had touched me. But this was not that. The Void of Runeterra consumed. What I felt here consumed nothing. It was cleaner. More complete. As though things had simply ceased to have existed, without violence, without trace, without even the courtesy of a scar that might at least confirm something had once been there.
And then the memory took form, and I saw where it came from.
The garden of Faruk's old house. Ancient trees filtering the light of early afternoon, stone lanterns along the gravel path, the delicate sound of the lake's water. And at the centre of the garden, my daughter.
Azra'il was kneeling upon a spread blanket. Porcelain dishes already arranged, small and delicate sweets set out with the care of someone who treats food as they treat combat: with respect for its form. Beside them, a pot trailing steam, and the fragrance rising from it was no ordinary thing. Even within the memory, I recognised the scent of rare ingredients, spirit leaves, herbs cultivated in a particular manner. That tea had cost effort. That tea had been made for someone.
Azra'il adjusted one of the dishes. Studied the arrangement. Adjusted it again, moving it two centimetres to the left as though the fate of the universe depended upon that angle. And I almost smiled, because I recognised that gesture, the gesture of one who awaits someone and wants everything to be perfect, and knows it already is perfect, but must touch something anyway because waiting is like that, restless, requiring occupation.
Then she murmured something. Quietly. Looking at the mixture in the pot, not at anyone visible.
"Is the proportion right? Last time she said she tasted something bitter at the end..."
She spoke to the air. To nothing. With the naturalness of one conversing with someone who is present, but whom I could not see. The same oddity I had noticed before, my daughter who spoke to herself in moments of concentration, as though some invisible presence were being consulted. Even noting it, I filed the strangeness away, as I always did.
Footsteps on the gravel path.
And I felt it before I saw it. The absence drew near like a shadow belonging to no body, subtle, but undeniable. The grass alongside the path seemed less alive. The sounds of the garden, birds, water, wind in the leaves, grew more distant, as though something between myself and them had absorbed a layer of what made the world the world.
Anastasia appeared at the bend in the path.
And I almost did not recognise her.
Not by her face, the face was unchanged, those sculpted features, a jaw that no jaw had ever held with such dignity. Not by her bearing, which still moved with the authority of one who had learnt that every step is a declaration. It was something less visible and more fundamental.
Before, when Anastasia arrived, the air electrified itself. The smell of ozone, static against skin, the sense that an ambulant storm had decided to enter the room and the room had best accommodate itself. Now, when she arrived, the air fell 'quiet.' Not the quiet of peace. The quiet of something that 'ought' to exist there and no longer did.
The mantle she wore bore the emblem of Grand Master of the Sect of the Celestial Sword. I looked at that, and understood that the girl the Patriarch had attempted to use as a bargaining piece now governed everything he had built. And the irony of it would have been exquisite, had the sensation of absence surrounding her not been so deeply unsettling.
"You are late," Azra'il said, the smile already in place.
"Unlike you, I have responsibilities." Anastasia descended the last steps of the path and entered the garden. The voice was the same, dry, sharp. Her violet eyes moving over the picnic with the quick assessment of one who catalogued terrain by reflex. "Whilst you spend the afternoon preparing sweets, I have an entire sect to govern."
"You are far too proper."
"I beg your pardon?"
Azra'il tasted a sweet with theatrical deliberation. "If you hold the power, you ought to do what every powerful person does. Delegate the work to others."
"That is called incompetence."
"That is called delegation."
"Delegation requires competent people." Anastasia sat upon the blanket with her customary impeccable posture, back straight, legs folded, as though the garden floor were a throne. "And unfortunately, competence is not exactly abundant."
Azra'il smiled. "Then the problem is not the method. It is your sect."
Anastasia looked at her with the expression I had come to know as 'you are insufferable and I have chosen this.' She reached for one of the cups.
"You are insufferable."
"And yet you came."
Few words. And within them, the entire intimacy of years. The certainty of one who knows the other will appear in spite of the complaints, and that the complaining is part of the ritual, and that the ritual is part of the love.
While Anastasia was not looking, I watched Azra'il observe her. Not with the curious fascination of the training courtyard at their first meeting, nor with the attention of one appraising an unknown power. With 'pride.' Silent, contained, the kind that needs no words, because it has existed so many times it has already put down roots inside the one who feels it.
And that was when I saw it.
The strands.
White threads amongst the black of Anastasia's hair. Not many, three, perhaps four silver lines descending through the dark waves like veins of light through obsidian. And I knew at once that this was not age. Cultivators could live centuries; Anastasia was too young for time to touch her hair. And even had that not been so, even had I wished to believe it natural, the quality of that white was not natural. It was not the colour that fades. It was the colour that had 'ceased to exist.' As though someone had drawn their fingers through those strands and removed from them not the pigmentation, but the very notion that colour was something which belonged to them.
I looked at that white and the sensation of absence I had felt when Anastasia arrived concentrated itself there, in those strands, as though I had found the source of what had been troubling me. And I thought of the Void of Runeterra, of the creatures that consume, of the darkness that devours. But no. This was not that. The Void of Runeterra was hunger. This was not hunger. There was no desire here, no violence, no appetite. There was simply... less. Less colour. Less presence. Less 'something'. As though Anastasia's existence were being gently edited, one layer at a time, by something that required no force because it met no resistance.
Azra'il reached out and touched one of the white strands. The gesture came with the familiarity of one who did this often, and with the worry of one who never grew accustomed to it.
"Another one has appeared."
Anastasia inclined her head slightly, as one confirming something obvious.
"Yes."
The naturalness in her voice said this was nothing new. And the way Azra'il released the strand, slowly, as though releasing it caused pain, said that the naturalness offered no comfort.
Azra'il poured the tea. The fragrance rose between them, dense and complex, rich with an intentionality that seemed too deliberate to be casual.
"This one is better," Anastasia said after the first sip. Her eyes closed for an instant, as one who savours something rare.
"Can you taste it?" Azra'il's voice came softly. Too softly.
Anastasia opened her eyes. She considered. Her brows drew fractionally together.
"A little."
Something in that answer troubled me, though I could not have said precisely what. The "a little" carried the weight of someone measuring something that ought to be natural, as though tasting tea were an achievement and a decision. And the way Azra'il received it, the restrained relief in the slight easing of her shoulders, as though "a little" were good news, all of it seemed to belong to a larger conversation I was hearing only in part.
I looked at the tea. At the rare ingredients. At the devotion with which Azra'il had prepared that blend. And I felt that there was something here I did not yet understand, but which ached in the same way regardless, like a dissonant note in a melody that has not yet resolved.
The afternoon stretched between them with the tranquillity of those who no longer need to fill time with words. Anastasia mentioned a dispute between elders of the sect, an irritating detail about training protocols. Azra'il listened, remarked something about the futility of bureaucracies in general, and stole the last sweet from the dish when Anastasia was gesturing with emphasis.
And then, some minutes later, Azra'il mentioned the elders' dispute in passing.
"I know," Anastasia replied, her brow lightly furrowed. "You heard me complaining about it just now."
"But the elders' dispute over hunting territories, you had already told me last night."
Anastasia went still. The cup halfway to her mouth. Her violet eyes narrowed, not in anger. In searching. Looking within her own memory for the previous evening, the conversation, the words that ought to be there and which, like the colour in her hair, seemed to have been gently removed.
"...Did I say that?"
The voice emerged low. Controlled. But I saw, in the minute tremor of her jaw, in the way her fingers tightened around the cup, the fear. Not the fear of one who faces an enemy. The fear of one who looks inward and finds an empty space where something ought to be. And in that instant, with the "a little" of the tea still echoing in me, with the white strands and the absence I had felt when she arrived, the pieces fitted together. Not as a complete answer. As an outline. The shape of something I did not yet fully understand, but already knew to be terrible: Anastasia was losing things. Flavours. Memories. Pieces of herself that left without noise, without trace, like colour ceasing to exist in strands of hair.
Azra'il did not let the moment linger. With the gentleness of one repositioning a fragile thing before it falls, she changed the subject, pointed to a flower in the garden, remarked on the season, her tone light and casual as a mantle laid over shoulders without its owner noticing.
And Anastasia allowed it. Accepted the change as though the flower in the garden were truly more important. The two of them pretending. Both knowing the other was pretending. And the space between what they knew and what they said filled with the sound of the lake's water and the fragrance of tea that existed to compensate for what was being lost.
In a moment when Anastasia turned her face towards the garden, following with her eyes a leaf that fell with the slowness of late autumn, Azra'il murmured something. Almost inaudibly. Her lips barely moving, her gaze fixed on a point that was not there, or that I could not see.
"The lapses are growing more frequent... how long since the last?"
And my daughter's face, in that instant when Anastasia was not watching, let fall every mask, the humour, the calm, the sarcasm. What remained was worry. Raw. The sort that aches to look at.
And I, who did not understand to whom she was speaking, added this strangeness to the rest. The growing collection of moments in which my daughter spoke to nothing.
The afternoon inclined towards dusk. The light in the garden shifted from gold to amber, and then to something softer, more fragile, as though even the sun knew it was witnessing something that deserved delicacy. The dishes were empty. The pot held its last drops. And the space between them, always present, always measured in centimetres and meanings, was closer than it had ever been.
Azra'il shifted upon the blanket. Without asking, without announcing, without making the gesture larger than it was. She lay down and rested her head in Anastasia's lap with the naturalness of one who had done this for years. Because at some point between the first cup of tea accepted and now, that lap had become the only place where my daughter permitted the weight of millennia to rest for an instant.
Anastasia did not react with surprise. Her fingers found Azra'il's hair as one who resumes an interrupted conversation, moving through it, smoothing it, touching the silver strands without comment.
The wind brought the scent of jasmine from the garden. A bird sang in the distance, a single note, clear, as though testing the silence before trusting it.
And Azra'il said, with the voice of one asking about the weather or the tea:
"Ana... Do you believe in reincarnation?"
Anastasia's fingers paused for an instant in her hair. Resumed their movement. Her violet eyes rose to the sky between the branches, where the first stars were beginning to appear like punctures in a dark curtain.
"Yes."
The wind passed again. The garden's leaves whispered.
"Why?"
Azra'il settled more comfortably in her lap. I watched my daughter's fingers close upon the fabric of Anastasia's mantle, not with force. With the delicacy of one holding something they are afraid to lose.
"I was thinking... if one day, when we part..." Her voice came lightly, as though what she was saying weighed less than it did. "Perhaps we reincarnate in different places. In different worlds. Perhaps we never see each other again. Perhaps we would not even recognise each other."
And I heard what she did not say. Because I knew. I knew that when my daughter died in this world, she would not reincarnate here. She would go to another world, another body, another life. And Anastasia would remain. And the distance between them would not be one of miles or years, it would be one of entire realities, of worlds that do not know the others exist.
Anastasia was silent for some seconds. The breeze moved the white strands in her hair, mingling them with the dark ones like threads of moonlight in the night. She observed the sky. And answered with the calm of one who says something that, to her, is as simple as breathing.
"I would find you even so."
Azra'il raised her face slightly.
"You seem very certain."
"It is not certainty." Anastasia touched Azra'il's brow with the tips of her fingers, lightly, as one marking a point on a map. "It is simply true."
Azra'il's ears moved towards the touch.
"Simply true?"
"Even if we reincarnate in different worlds. Even if we do not remember who we were. Even if we do not recognise each other." Anastasia's fingers descended from her brow and found a strand of her hair, winding it slowly. "I would find someone I loved to distraction. And when that happened..." The corner of Anastasia's mouth curved, that rare smile, the one that cost pride and was worth a thousand. "I would know it was you."
The garden fell quiet. Even the bird ceased its song.
Azra'il looked up at her. And I saw upon my daughter's face something that very few things across her long lives had managed to produce: the struggle between wanting to believe and knowing too much.
"That doesn't sound like a very scientific method," she said. And the voice came out almost right. Almost steady.
"Love has never been scientific."
Anastasia pinched Azra'il's lupine ear, the gesture that was at once correction and tenderness, their own private language, invented over years to say things no word in any tongue could cover. And she leant down. A kiss to her brow. Unhurried. The sort that is not punctuation, but declaration.
"If only it were that simple," Azra'il murmured. To herself, to the air, to something I could not see.
Anastasia heard. Her violet eyes descended to Azra'il's face. And I waited for the question, 'what do you mean? Why would it not be?', but the question did not come. Anastasia simply looked at her for a long moment, her fingers still in Azra'il's hair, her face bearing the expression of one who knows there are doors within the person they love that have not yet opened, and who chooses, out of love and not weakness, to wait.
She did not comment. Instead, she began to sing.
Not to hum. To sing. Her voice rising slowly from the silence like a shoot breaking through earth, first the melody, then the words, then the meaning revealing itself layer by layer, like a painting that only shows its true colours when the light changes.
🎵 "Before the first star, before time was born..." 🎵
What I heard made me feel something I cannot name, between recognition and astonishment, between tenderness and fear.
🎵 "I was already you and you were already me...
We were pure light, without name, without fear, without form,
We were one, we were love." 🎵
Because the song spoke of something Anastasia ought not to know. Of souls that existed before lives, of promises made before birth, of beings who separate and seek each other between worlds. And it was almost the story of my daughter. The story that Anastasia did not know. The story that no one in that world knew.
Azra'il opened her eyes.
🎵 "...and then there was a falling,
one of us was lost,
in a forgotten world,
in a body of pain..." 🎵
I saw my daughter's face change. I saw the question form, 'how?', and watched it die before it reached her lips. Anastasia sang with the naturalness of one who has found words that resonate without understanding why. A piece of music learnt somewhere, at some point, perhaps learnt in another life.
🎵 "And out of love I came, I crossed through portals, tore through veils...
I wore flesh and blood believing I would remember,
but here, memory sleeps." 🎵
Anastasia's hand remained in Azra'il's hair, her fingers moving with a gentleness that the woman of lightning would never have shown whilst awake, but music did that, opened within her doors that at any other moment would have been locked. And I watched my daughter close her eyes at the touch, her head tilting towards Anastasia's hand like a flower turning towards the sun without deciding to do so.
🎵 "I know that I know you, even without remembering from where.
I feel you in the folds of time,
in the weeping that comes without reason..." 🎵
Because certain souls recognise each other before the bodies do, before the names, before any memory. And perhaps Anastasia's soul knew something about Azra'il that neither of them understood, not as knowledge, but as resonance. As the sound one string produces when another string, in another instrument, sounds the same note.
🎵 "In the shiver without wind, in the tear without cause.
My soul weeps your absence,
even surrounded by everything...
Because nothing is whole; I know what we were." 🎵
Azra'il's fingers closed around the fabric of Anastasia's mantle. Slowly. Like one gripping the edge of something the wind wishes to take. And I understood the gesture not as an observer, but as a mother. My daughter was trying to anchor herself. In that lap. In that voice. In that moment that time was already carrying away.
🎵 "We came from another world,
we made promises without words...
That we would return, that we would find each other...
that love would guide us home." 🎵
🎵 "...but the weight of flesh presses down,
the body falls silent,
and the sacred name hides away..." 🎵
Anastasia's voice trembled. Not from weakness, from depth. Like a string vibrating too strongly and finding a tone it did not know it carried. And her fingers in Azra'il's hair closed slightly, an almost invisible tightening, as though she too were holding something she could not name.
🎵 "You still sing within me,
a sound that no one hears...
A frequency buried between heartbeats
and longing." 🎵
Azra'il raised the hand that had been gripping the mantle and found Anastasia's hand within her hair. Their fingers wove together. Without opening her eyes. Without saying a word. The oldest language there is, skin against skin, warmth against warmth, the promise the body makes when the mouth does not know how.
And Anastasia did not pull away, she pressed back.
🎵 "Before the first life,
I swore that I would find you...
And even lost in this world,
I carry your echo in my chest..." 🎵
Her eyes opened slowly. They looked upward at Anastasia's face, lit by the last light of dusk, the white strands shining like threads of starlight amongst the night of her hair. And I watched my daughter memorise that face with the intensity of one who knows that certain images must be engraved more deeply than ordinary memory reaches, in the place where neither time nor the distance between worlds can erase them.
🎵 "...even without remembering your face,
I have loved you since before I was born..." 🎵
Anastasia looked down. Violet eyes found blue ones. And for an instant the music existed only between them. Only for them. Anastasia's voice softening until it was almost a whisper, as though the last words were a secret that only those close enough deserved to hear.
🎵 "...even across this distance of worlds,
I came to bring you back." 🎵
The melody descended like a sun setting. Slowly. Without haste. And the final notes came with Anastasia's voice almost touching Azra'il's face, so close that the words were more breath than sound.
🎵 "If you remember me, even as sleep, as dream, seeks me out...
In the feeling of your heart,
I shall never cease to look for you." 🎵
The garden fell silent. The sort of silence that exists after certain pieces of music, not the absence of sound, but the presence of what sound leaves behind. The echo that remains in the skin.
Their hands were still woven together. Neither moved. As though releasing would be to agree that the moment was over, and neither was ready for that.
"Did you sleep?"
Anastasia's voice, gentle, looking down.
"No." My daughter's voice came hoarse. Almost inaudible. "I'm listening."
Anastasia passed her fingers across Azra'il's face. Once. Slowly. Wiping away something that might have been a tear, or might have been nothing, and both of them pretending it was nothing, because certain truths are too tender to be named.
And they remained like that. The sun disappearing. The first stars lighting one by one like lanterns that someone hangs in the sky with care. The garden darkening around them, but there, in that square metre of blanket and lap and woven hands, the darkness did not enter. Not because there was light. Because there was something stronger.
The memory dissolved.
Slowly. More slowly than any other. As though the memory itself knew it was precious and resisted going, or as though my daughter, in keeping it, had held on more firmly, more deeply, in the place where the things that matter remain for ever.
The last image I saw before being returned to the space between doors: Azra'il in Anastasia's lap. Her eyes closed. Her face at peace in a way I rarely saw, the peace that does not come from the absence of pain, but from the presence of something large enough to make it bearable.
And the white strands of Anastasia's hair shining in the light of the first stars.
I remained in the dark between memories. And I thought of all I had seen.
Of the years that had passed like a song. Of the happiness built with tea and music and battles and shared silences. Of the white threads that are not age. Of the flavour that is fading. Of the memories beginning to fail.
Of the song that seemed to know things the singer ought not to know.
And of my daughter, who carries the knowledge that she will depart, not to death, which would be merciful, which would be an ending. To another world. Another universe. Where Anastasia does not exist. Where the voice that sang that song will be a memory my daughter carries intact through every life that follows, because she remembers. She always remembers. Every face, every name, every love. And perhaps that is the greater cruelty: not to forget. To remember everything. To remember the voice, the lap, the tea. And to know there is no way back.
I saw the happiness. I saw the love. I saw the life that the two of them had built with the stubbornness of those who refuse to accept that good things are temporary.
But I saw what came before as well.
Before the Inexistence claims what belongs to it. Before the worlds separate. Before my daughter departs, carrying every memory like a weight that no one else can share. My daughter who had never loved. Her heart had traversed entire ages sealed like a door whose key no one could find, until a woman of lightning and pride turned the lock without even realising she was doing so.
This was my daughter's first love. It bore the weight of every life that had come before it.
It was beautiful.
It was fragile.
And it was already ending.
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💬 Author's Note
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This chapter was probably one of the most difficult I have ever written for this fic. Not for action or fighting... but because it needed to carry years of a relationship in fragments of memory.
And honestly? This is one of my greatest sorrows with Shénvara. 😭
Because I know that Azra'il and Anastasia's relationship could easily carry an entire novel on its own. Their development did not happen quickly. It took years. Of music. Of training. Of tea. Of quarrels. Of silences. Of shared habits. Small gestures accumulated until, at some point, without their noticing precisely when it happened, "the house" became "our house."
But since the main story is a Runeterra fanfic, we are only ever seeing fragmented memories, I had to condense an entire relationship into specific moments. Small pieces, chosen by Azra'il herself. And I think that says quite a lot on its own.
So the fact that she keeps these memories with such care... these apparently simple scenes... already shows the weight they hold for her.
And yes... I think this chapter also made clear just how much Anastasia changed Azra'il.
Azra'il has always been someone emotionally distant. Someone accustomed to loss, to leaving, to surviving. But with Anastasia she learnt something far more dangerous than any battle: attachment.
And perhaps that is precisely what makes everything more painful.
As for what has happened to Anastasia... well... unfortunately I still cannot say much. 😭
But I can say one thing: it is directly connected to the Inexistence.
And no, it does not work quite like the Void of Runeterra. The Void consumes. The Inexistence... removes. Silently. Memories. Sensations. Presence. As though reality were forgetting that something ought to be there.
And I think some of you have already noticed this, in the white strands, in the memory lapses, in the fact that she has begun to lose flavours.
Now...
about the song.
I will only say one thing:
Nothing in that chapter was placed there by accident.
Every verse carries meaning.
Every line.
Every metaphor.
And perhaps the most important detail is this very one: Anastasia sings things she ought not to know.
About souls.
About reunions.
About crossing between worlds.
About forgetting.
About recognising someone without remembering who they are.
And that is no coincidence.
Perhaps Anastasia's soul is far more extraordinary than even she had believed.
Or perhaps... she has forgotten.
So I shall leave just this one small piece of information:
Perhaps Anastasia was never merely a gifted cultivator in an ordinary cultivation world.
Perhaps there was something far older within her.
Something she could no longer remember.