You could not know what was hidden inside a place simply by arriving in it. So of course there were monsters. Of course there were ancient tombs, or ruins, or whatever it turned out to be. That was not evidence of anything except that this world was strange, which she had already known.
It proved nothing about whether the old woman was telling the truth.
Elara let her gaze drift.
Elara had gotten old too, if you looked at her. Elara remembered — hazily, the way you remember something that happened while you were half-asleep — that when she had first come into this body, it had been seventeen, maybe. Something like that. She could not be certain. The memory of those first weeks was blurred at the edges, unreliable, the kind of thing you could not fully trust.
Sometimes she still thought she was twenty-five, sitting behind a desk in an office somewhere, signing documents that actually mattered.
Then she remembered being seventeen.
Then something else.
