Eight Hundred Years
By: Amber Michelle

In Goldoa it was easy to lose track of time, and Lehran did so-- often. The redwoods grew taller in increments of five or ten years, and the dragons more slowly than that. He watched the young prince grow from an infant to a toddling troublemaker, to a studious boy who followed his elder brother's shadow across gardens and into the deep reaches of the fortress - to libraries or on hunts, he seemed indifferent. But the elder remained the same, their sister could have been carved from alabaster, and to their father, change was anathema. Beyond their borders, his wife grew old and died, and Begnion's imperial mausoleum was opened for the first time.

I thought you would be more concerned, Nasir had said when he brought news of Altina's death. He paused, looked off to the line of trees that surrounded Lehran's villa, and said, I am told she didn't smile often in her latter years. It seems unlike Altina.

Lehran hadn't wanted to hear her name, but the sound of it didn't twist in his chest like it used to. We all change, he said. Your king excepted. I can tell you on authority he was born just as he is now-- with no hair, and a parabola of a frown.

Nasir laughed, and another century passed on the wings of that sound, carried by the pine-tinged breeze across valleys overflowing with Goldoa's morning mists and the deepest, living chasms on Tellius. Lehran flew over them often, and sometimes landed beside a river or a metallic vein of rock to examine the pigmentation, or the effect of changes in soil on the native plants. His goddess once told him he knew the land better than she did, yet all he'd spent his life observing were her works of art while attempting to find her footprints among the natural formations of rock. At times he found marks that might very well be remnants of the goddess he once loved, one no longer in existence; of her parts, Yune was prone to inspiring exasperation, and one did not love Ashera - one merely obeyed, and reserved emotion for moments of weakness.

But Yune would have been a pleasant companion on his walks beneath Goldoa's green canopies. She loved birds and flowers, would sit for hours staring at a butterfly perched on her hand and explaining how it reminded her of Ashera with its tiny, perfect feathers and ordered patterns. This one, she would say, even looks like Ashera. Look at that bright orange on its wings. Doesn't it remind you of her hair?

Yes.

We should show her!

Don't be silly, he said. She'd only say it looks like you.

Many monarchs found their home in his gardens after he remembered that conversation, drawn by the flowers he planted in Yune's memory - her favorites: lilacs, white aster, red clover, red flowers and blue, the whole chaotic spectrum. Lehran wished he'd kept his medallion when he watched them flicker from one flower to the next, drifting on the wind. She might hear him even though he lacked his birthright. She always used to say: just knowing you're around makes me feel warm, Lehran. Don't ever change.

It seemed he had never changed to begin with. Once he came of age, his body slowed its decay until it stopped altogether, and instead of passing his knowledge on to the generations after him, they entrusted their memories and research to him when they faded from the world, their time spent. He watched his children die, and his grandchildren after them, until he stopped speaking to his descendants at all and found his home with the younger races, whose lives passed so quickly he didn't have a chance to grow attached to them.

Then he met Altina.

Lehran decided not to think about that until Dheginsea slipped and mentioned the laguz in Begnion, a dark muttering regarding how far her empire had fallen, how tainted the ideals had become. Laguz, enslaved by beorc? The last word wavered, Lehran's tone both a laugh and a question. Altina would never allow--

Altina is dead and her dreams followed her to the grave. Dheginsea's voice echoed sharply from the domed ceiling of the audience chamber, empty now but for them. He closed his eyes. And then, after a count of ten: put it from your mind, Lehran. Nothing can be done about it now. A problem of this magnitude requires Ashera's hand.

Indeed. He couldn't have said it better.

Once again Lehran acquainted himself with the world of beorc, and once again wondered how anything they built lasted when they rushed to do things, say things, buy things, and complete whatever journey they'd planned for their short lives. No wonder it was easier for them to destroy things-- Tellius, in their eyes, ceased to exist after sixty solar years. They didn't remember the goddess. Altina's promise to Ashera - to maintain peace on Tellius, avoid war, and build a culture stronger than the ancient civilizations of their Zunanma ancestors - was broken.

They were fools to think it would last, he and Altina, and yet, when she told Ashera she would build an empire worthy of the goddess, he'd believed her. If she had lived--

But Altina was dead. His granddaughter, so far removed, was killed, and his heron children followed her to the grave. Lehran felt the searing heat of their ashes long after they stopped raining from the sky. If he'd possessed his birthright he might have had his revenge with a dirge of pain or destruction - a plague, perhaps, an earthquake, a blight upon their crops, a famine. Instead, it was Dheginsea's words that drove him for the next twenty years; the the injustice of this world, the flaws etched deep in the body of the populace, were indeed problems only a goddess could solve. She would burn their sins away with the light of her judgment as she had once washed the world clean with floods and storms. Lehran kept careful track on the years that passed and the results of his interference. Like the ecosystems of Goldoa, mortal culture could be controlled by slight shifts in climate and environmental circumstances, be they political or physical. And if he had been divine rather than mortal himself, he might have succeeded. He was not.

Sanaki liked to remind him of that. At times she would tell him to bend his stubborn neck and acknowledge his own inferiority to such as gods, and at others she drew him close and offered her lips to taste and the embrace of her body, and beneath the blanket of midnight darkness her voice was softer, her words gentler. She was like a prickly flower in the sunlight, thorny and forbidding at one moment, yet soft and sweet if one approached her correctly, and always beautiful. Always.

Lehran couldn't watch when it was her turn to find rest in the mausoleum beside her ancestors. He fled to the eternal days of Serenes. Beside the lake of his childhood he contemplated the emerald depth and his gray reflection and wondered if he'd ever tried sinking to the bottom. He tried to remember Altina's death, and found nothing; the others were ghosts in his memories - his first wife, his daughters, their husbands and children. He remembered their names, but not their faces. Not anymore.

Would he forget Sanaki? Zelgius? Would they die a second death in his memory?

There were many things he should have done. Zelgius wouldn't have accepted a blessing, but Lehran could have taken Sanaki to the goddess and asked, begged Ashera to make her eternal, even if it meant she'd be a child forever. He would give up his privileges as her husband if it meant Sanaki would be at his side forever with her quick temper, her acerbic observations, her thin fingers combing his hair and calling it beautiful-- an eternal child, the only one he would never lose.

One year had passed since her death. Only one.

It was like losing himself all over again.

.