The matron mother tried to smile as her eyes, clouded by cataracts, passed along each of the mementos of her room at the former orphanage. The painting on her wall, the clock at her bedside, the sword that hung around her headboard which she may have wielded when younger. Once upon a time, she might have been able to associate each trinket with a face she had known in her early years, some place she had once explored that no longer existed. Now she afforded none of them much more than a passing glance, scrutinizing their meaning as though they belonged to a total stranger. Insofar as she knew, they probably did.

Take only what will sustain you on the trip. Those had been the words of their caravan's leader. But who was to say what sustenance meant anymore?

A worn and crooked limb, spotted with age, finally emerged from the sea of voluminous black velvet that was her traveling cloak. Wrestling for a moment with small hands that quaked from arthritis, she was finally able to pick her faded leather knapsack up off the floor. All of her effects were in order. There was no point in bringing anything else. Whatever power those knickknacks once held over her, they were no longer present. That was another person now.

"Matron! Is there anything I can help you with up there?"

She paused for a moment at the sound of the woman's voice, consciously struggling to find some context in which she might recognize her caretaker of over thirty years. When remembrance once more eluded her, all she did was shake her withered white head in defeat. With slow, measured footsteps, the matron eased her careful way down over the rickety stairway. The whole house around her appeared as every bit infirm as she was, from the creaky oak steps bearing her up to the worn yellow planks of the walls she now turned to for balance. She was glad the day was calm. One stiff breeze could have been more than enough to take the house right out from under them.

"What? Matron!" The middle-aged woman by the stove turned heel in a flurry of panicked activity, helping her down over the last few risers of the stairway. "You shouldn't go doing that without my help, especially in your condition. It's dangerous!"

"Oh, please," the old crone barked, suddenly regaining some of her lost wind. "I'm not a complete invalid yet. I can still do some things for myself, you know."

"Yes." She sighed the word more than spoke it. "Yes, I know."

The matron of the house studied her reaction. She had to have been in her early forties, with a refined, windworn look about her face. Crows feet teased at the corners of her eyes, while the tawny brown of her shoulder-length hair was beginning to show traces of gray on and about the widow's peak. Had her contrary nature and intermittent forgetfulness put those features there?

"Did you forget anything?" her caretaker quickly put in.

Everything, she felt like saying, but shook her head instead.

"Well, that's good." She helped the senior settle herself into a chair and went to pour her some broth from the pot. "You'd best eat up, then. We have a long trek ahead of us, and you're going to need your strength."

She fought briefly with the spoon before finally succeeding in getting some of the soup and vegetables into her mouth. "Where are we going?"

The woman kept her convalescence, more than aware of her failing mental health. "To the new city, mother. Don't you remember? There's a nice scientist waiting for us who can help you with your condition."

The details of their journey were already forgotten. "Mother? I'm your mother!"

"Yes," she replied, then added, "I mean no, not technically. You were the mother of the orphanage before we all grew up. You took care of us, and now we're taking care of you."

The old woman stared at her for one long, silent moment. "What's your na--"

"Poline," was her reply, even before the question was entirely off of her tongue. She knew this game, knew it all too well. Discussion of any kind was always the catalyst, forcing synapses into firing where few were still functional. As a result, the more questions she asked, the more information she forgot. It was an ugly cycle that Poline and the others sought desperately to end. "My name is Poline, mother. Now, please . . ."

"What's the name of this city we're going to?"

"What? Well . . . Midgar."

"What's my name? And what is this place we're in? Where is every--"

"Mother." Poline reached across the table and took the matron's wrinkled face into both her hands. "You're confused right now. Okay? And I know that must be very frightening, but none of us are going to give up on you. That's why we're taking this trip. Now, drink your soup. Please? For me?"

The woman's eyes became pleading, even close to tears at having to see one of her oldest friends reduced to this state. The matron at last took her spoon back up, humming with fright and teetering back and forth on her chair as she fought to finish her meal. When it appeared as though the herbs were succeeding in somewhat pacifying her, Poline picked herself up from the table and made way for any sanctuary that didn't have half-timbered walls.

A little ways away from the house, strewn off to the side of a beaten-down footpath, a herd of chocobos with manes of blue and black warked and scuffed at the ground with quiet impatience. Each one was reined comfortably to a series of tented coaches, where the last of the town's orphans scuttled back and forth to make certain all of their cargo was secure for the trek. In spite of their mother's failing health, their spirits were dauntless. Maybe it was just the thrill of finally leaving the nest that excited them so. Poline just couldn't find it within herself to share in their enthusiasm.

"Watch it with those perishables!" her husband roared at one of the younger ones. "You smash that crate and that's a day's worth of rations we'll be without!"

"Thom, don't be so hard on them." She rubbed a hand up against the back of his tunic as he tossed another bedroll into their coach. "Have you forgotten already how the matron used to care for us?"

"Quite the opposite." He turned back around to face her, his thick peppered beard doing little to mask the sunken tiredness of his face. "The matron is the only mother I ever had, and I don't want anything to happen to her."

The troubled look on his face mirrored her own, and for a moment the entropy of the situation made the other orphans stop what they were doing. A simple look from their caravan's leader sent them all scurrying back to the task at hand.

"I take it from the look on your face," he said, "that things aren't going any better between you and her."

Her bottom lip quivered slightly, but she suppressed it. "We'll have to leave soon if there's any hope left of helping her at all. We'll start out just as soon as I take her up to the cemetery one last time."

The coldness started to creep back into her husband's voice. "What possible reason could you have for taking her up there?"

"She asked me once when we were younger that if it ever came down to it and she started to forget the ones she had already buried, I was to take her up there one last time to say goodbye to them."

Thom smiled, his cold shoulder having suddenly thawed. "Does she remember the promise you made to her?" he asked, not at all sounding bitter or sarcastic.

"I remember," she told him. "That's all that matters."

The afternoon dwindled quickly, with a pale white sun constantly punching at the sullen gray skies but never able to penetrate them. Thom waited down at the base of the promontory while Poline lead their ageless matron arm-in-arm up towards the top of the rockface. At its zenith, small cairns with simple headstones ran in a circle along the verdant ground around them. Wincing slightly from the bitter sting of the wind, the more elderly of the two bent on wounded knee before the marker closest to them.

"I've . . ." she began, then closed her eyes as though looking within for the proper memory. "Have I been here before?"

"Many times," Polina said to her, trying to lighten the emotional blow as much as she could. "Each time another friend leaves for the next world, you say goodbye to them here."

She could feel the memory. It was close by, with its hand lightly brushing her shoulder but never squeezing it in support. It simply lingered like a shade, only barely conscious of its own existence. The matron's hand probed the headstone, trying to make out its inscription. Too many decades of wind and erosion wore the cracked tablet thin, the name and epitaph all but erased. Her jittery, palsied fingers skirted lower down the marker, pushing back the dirt and moss where exposure to the elements was lessened. Her nails traced out what words were still readable, and an incalcuable grief abruptly tore at her chest.

. . . pure as snow . . .

"I'm ready to leave now," she said to Poline without turning to face her.

"Mother?"

"Now!" Sadness cracked her voice.

Thom watched the scene unfold with silent sympathy. When it appeared as though they were through paying their respects, he gave their town one last look. Nature was already laboring overtime to take downwhat was left of the old, two-story townhouses. Most of their foundations bent and leaned at strange angles, with alders and vine already creeping across unswept porches and staring windows. Nothing much remained of it now but memories and soon, he realized, they would fade too.