The years rolled into one another-at first crashing and crowding but then ebbing and flowing. Time had a way of smoothing over the creases of memory quickly and quietly.
She felt as if she had left something, or maybe someone, behind. But who or what exactly…that was something just beyond the hazy limits of the horizon at this point. At times she envisioned spotting a distant continent across the endless ocean of her consciousness, but more often than not that was just a figment of her imagination. Like a blue-haired angel, head tilted playfully toward her, a bright gleam in the eyes. Anyone and no one in particular. Just a lovely creation of a limitless mind.
When they came to her shivering and wide-eyed she would gaze into their pasts, presents, and futures. In her detachment she thus witnessed the beginning of time as well as the very end. The thing no one could have understood was just how blindingly bright the flow of time was. No one could understand but her, of course, or not until the next eternal bearer arrived. And it wasn't as if she could ever look away or close her eyes. The brightness was perennial-perpetual like she was.
Those who came to Onashia as girls left as young men and women. Sometimes they left in tears, sometimes they left in a joyful hurry, but all eventually did leave. She, however, could not leave the chasm in which she was bound by duty, time, and space.
Daydreaming was not all that it was chalked up to be. To her the endless continuum of waking dreams were more or less a slew of glorified and somehow also horrifically beautiful nightmares. Not all of what she saw, whether it was pure fantasy or what some called "memory", was tragic in the traditional sense. Some, if not most, was what most would consider sublimely lovely.
Most of the visions involved flying.
The sun would glance off of a rounded cockpit window as they soared above fields and oceans of velvety clouds. The moon would float loosely in the night sky as stars peeked curiously out at them from their reaches worlds and galaxies away. Sometimes they would be engaged in battle-swerving adroitly in and out of lines of fire. Protected and pushed ever onward by their love and their bond…or…something that felt like a bond. Didn't sharing a bond with some entity other than oneself necessitate there being another involved? All she knew with any degree of certainty was that she had never been alone while flying.
Yes-there had to have been someone else. Someone to pair with or be in a pair with. At times in the silence Onashia felt very sure that there had been someone. Someone very important, at that. If only she could remember why there was this someone in the first place. All she had to go off of was the sound of a girl laughing sweetly and the fraying seams of a discolored stuffed doll. These paltry pieces of some long forgotten past were held like gems deep within Onashia. Almost so deep that she herself could not find them.
But where had she gone? When had she gone? Who was she? She figured she was close enough to finding this out as her release was near. She had been waiting so long to feel free.
Yun stepped forward, hesitant at first but then steadfast in her conviction, to embrace her. Glimmering dust swirled upwards as Onashia felt the chains of eternity finally begin loosening their grip on her. The waves of millennia pulsed around them as Yun slowly relieved her of her ageless burden. Onashia took one last look at the cavernous space in which she had decided the fates of entire civilizations.
She finally closed her translucent crimson eyes and for the first time in a long time could see.
The girl from her dreams stood facing away from her in front of a gently babbling brook. Sunlight darted through the thick foliage overhead and threw golden specks of dust all over the forest floor. She wanted to call out to the girl, but she couldn't even make a sound despite the urgency of the questions she needed to ask. As if she had heard anyway, the blue-haired girl turned ever so slightly so that Onashia could see just a sliver of the wondrously familiar face.
Then in the sweetest voice Onashia had ever heard in lifetimes of being the girl said, "Well, Dominura, does this mean you're ready to fly with me again?"