Centuries: Tales of Zestiria

by Meredith Mary

Mikleo wasn't one for sitting still, not one for indulging in self-pity, not one who would let himself be defined by his loss, not one to stew in his mourning. This he had decided. For Soreys sake and his own equally. But how will he spend the years, and how will he cope with having Sorey back in his life after so much time has passed?

4. Centuries Later

He had been travelling for centuries. There was always somewhere new to go, some new shrine that had been discovered and all the follow up questions that came with it. He was never bored.

Mikleo had found he had a real talent for water colours. Lailah had given him a set as a gift. He kept the original wooden case, but the blocks of pigment had been replaced many times over. As a water seraph Mikleo had great control over the paint. Once the pigment was dissolved in water he could be precise about exactly where the paint went on the page, how much the pigment intermingled. He painted landscapes, cityscapes, and interiors of ruins and sanctuaries. He could do portraiture as well, he liked to record the faces of the humans he met for posterity. He had tried to paint Sorey once and broke down when he found he couldn't. He could get the rough shape of his body right and his scruffy brown hair, but couldn't do the face right. He was furious with himself, he could remember what he looked like, why couldn't he paint him?

Mikleo had spent several decades with another seraph who had devoted more years of her life to painting than Mikleo had been alive. She had assured him that it was normal, and tasked him with painting a portrait of himself without a mirror, and he had only succeeded in painting a bluish humanoid blob, even though he could feel his face for reference, and he didn't feel so bad about not being able to paint Sorey. He had completed the self-portrait later with the aid of a mirror and he found it a strange experience. He had never paid too much attention to the mirror, he knew what he looked like and there was hardly ever any change. So for the first time in many years he had focused intently on his face, seeing the things he had never really noticed, the angle of his violet eyes, the narrowness of his nose, the way his circlet showed through the gaps in this fringe. His face had gotten a little longer over the years. His hair had grown down his back and was tied up in a high ponytail. He had the almost as fringe as short as it was when he was young. The awkward phase of growing it out enough to tie it back would have been decades and Mikleo wasn't willing to deal with that, besides, his hair had framed his face the same way ever since he had hair, he didn't know whether he'd still be recognisable without it. Which was very important. Especially with Soreys potential memory loss. In addition he felt like he'd be exposed without it. He wore his circlet all the time, but because of his thick hair, no one but the people close to him ever really saw it, it was a semi private thing. He did worry about his hair. It was getting really long and it was really heavy. He didn't know what he would do when it started touching the floor. He would have to tie it up somehow.

A few years later the painting had been hung up in Elysia. He occasionally sent large boxes full of rolled up paintings back to the house he and Sorey once shared, despite the fact he was never there. The villagers thought to hang it up as a reminder that Mikleo was still one of them, and that he was coming back one day, although not all of them believed it.

Mikleo had become very in demand among human scholars. He was considered the authority on archaeology in Glenwood. He had published dozens of large, thorough, fully illustrated volumes, for each region and time period. He had helped found several universities, most notably the reestablishment of the university at Marlind. Every now and then he'd take a few decades out from travelling to take up a tenured professorship. It wasn't without its difficulties, despite the fact that the average resonance of humans had been increasing over the centuries, he still had students that couldn't always hear him. He had to make sure his slides were very thorough and that he had a member of staff with high resonance to act as an interpreter when necessary. But he'd never stay still for more than a few decades, for Mikleo that felt fleeting, for his human colleagues that felt like a normal length of tenure.

But no matter how long he lived, he couldn't shake the feeling that his childhood in Elysia with Sorey was half his life. That twenty years out of what was now nearing a thousand was somehow half. To him it was. Maybe it was because he felt like he had barely grown for the majority of his life. He tried to compare his maturity to that of the humans he had known. If he had felt like 18 when he was 18 how did he feel now that centuries had passed? 24 maybe. He did feel more mature, but nowhere near as mature as people saw him as. For stories of a mysterious man in blue wandering around the ruins of the world had been told for hundreds of years, his earlier books were seen as historical documents in themselves, and when he discussed archaeology he had people who were clearly more mature tan him hanging on to his every word like it was gospel. He felt a sham. There had been times when he had been confused, times he had been lonely, flustered and panicked and he had felt like nothing other than a little lost child.