The entire world dried, slowly yet agonisingly, and she waited.
The undead marched across the realms, adding more to their master's grim forces, and she waited.
Her very grasp on reality waned, threatening to destroy her mind, her elf, and she waited.
Patiently, she spread, incorporeally, across the existence she knew. The Ban, the one thing tethering her to existence, was almost gone, just keeping her alive in the barest possible form. Its decay affected her perception of time: what was once the clear passage of the years blurred and excoriated, until it was an instinctual, mindless yet sure perception of the seasons, vaguely akin to the biological clock during a mortal's sleep cycle.
It was a strange thing indeed, that with each rot of the conscious self, the intuition was fostered, and prediction was enhanced, as to make gambling less necessary in light of a certain understanding of what to do, how to do, when to do.
So she waited, no longer humanoid or physical, just a "conscience", a primal program of instincts and emotion, tied to the entirely of a realm on the edges of collapse, tendrils of awareness feeling everything, even the Dead Zone.
Still, a rational thought or two could still manifest. Most notable was the vague trace of insecurity, in lieu of previous, unsuccessful attempts at making the world a better place, each failing miserably. This was the easiest to dismiss: either you do, or you do not, and when there's nothing left either is sound, either is perfect acceptance of fate and destinity.
The second was more persistent, however: what next? She did not have an answer, and though she tried to dismiss it as best as she could she could not help but let it overwhelm her "mind" every once in a while in the procession of seasons. A strong possibility was her own demise, finishing the process the Ban's decay had already begun.
And yet she accepted it, the final uncertainty in her at last clear path.
So she waited, feeling the world and its procession, feeling trade routes disappear, seas boil as a lesser ban was revoked, unholy howls echoe across forests, the screams as light burned the flesh of the inoccent and the sinister void of mana spread. She was life, continuing to exist in spite of the dangers, just feeling the instinct to burst at the most right of times, in the likeness of a seed, waiting to sprout.
And, eventually, she did.
It was an instant, unadaltured by time. An event brust across the Multiverse, changing the laws of reality themselves, which started on the very world her's was connected to. The planar portal, buried deep beneath the castle, flared suddenly in one moonless night, bringing the ruinous land down in a world-shaking blaze that illuminated the skies with a pale white light. The troops of the undead, arching through it, were decimated.
As soon as it happened, the Ban was gone, but before it took her consciousness down with it, she casted the one spell she had nurtured for all that time, giving in to the primal instinct to expand, to sprout, to repair.
The effects were instantaneous. Another tremor, happening so simultaneously with the planar portal's that it was practially the same, but this time spanning the entirety of the world. First, the leylines long dried reactivated, renewed with wild mana, a nexus coming from the remnants of the portal that spanned the entire plane, bringing life back into the Dead Zone and turning arid wasteland back into lush greenery, and mutating all sorts of animal life into stranger forms.
Second, there was another wave of colourless fire, searing through these leylines, expanding and burning through everything. Mages died in these flames, as did enchantments and spells of all sorts. This time, there were few if any beings entirely dependent on mana, and those few that still existed perished as well.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the Chime, the one artifact that caused the planewide drought in the first place, melted, its gray frame blakening into a molten metal that did not emit light, just a darkness as intense as the void. Its glyphs were claned blank and its frame distorted, until it was a searing black liquid, that began to evaporate and dry out, until it was lost to existence, forever. This went unnoticed by its owner, incinerated just moments before.
The skies across the entire plane glowing with multicoloured lights, aurorae of mana that obscured the stars and set the heavens ablaze, and to the sapient life that survived it was most surely the signs of Armageddon, land twisting and sprouting vegetation, until not a bare rock remained. Sounds of cracking, explosions and screams filled the air in all directions, amplied by raw, wild magic affecting sound itself.
Eventually, the spectacled died. As the leylines were reinvigorated and settled, their glow began to dim, just as lava eventually quenches as its life giving ashes spread across the land. The fires stopped, though their ghostly essence cling on in some parts of the world, hearths that would never cool down. The skylights dimmed, returning to the blank of night just as the sun began to rise.
And it rose in a world reflecting its promise of life, now verdant where death once ruled. The world was finally reborn, even if at such a high a cost.
And so was she. As the storms of mana settled, they coalesced into her again, reborn and at her prime, her tendrils spreading in all directions. She felt like she had just awoken, as if her experiences throught the centuries were dreams and her brief death the one pause that scrambled her mind back together. And indeed, her previous behaviour felt like dream logic, as if the degeneration was the most alien of states.
Yet, although her memories and mind were revived, she knew she had changed. The added sense of rationality and thought was certainly something she had never experienced before, and as the dawn rose so did a feeling of worry. The "what happens next" inundated her thoughts: she knew that this tranquil, revived world would not last forever, and under no circumstances should she ever falter in preserving it.
She would have to watch it, and no amounts of ancient failures would surface to guilt her ever again.
With what she felt as a breath, she manifested physically for the first time in centuries, a woman clad in the greens of the land, the blues of the sky and the gold of the rising sunlight. A physical existence was different merely in self imposed restrictions, but it would make all the difference to whoever survived the chaos and needed a sign of comfort.
And, indeed, comforting and nurturing those who survived was all she had in mind. That was the one thing about her that didn't change in the slightest.
So, wasting not a second, she walked the woodlands, helping whomever she found, and preparing them for the future.