Some days, as I hauled rock and wood and fitted one part of a stone into another though I knew not how, I would gaze off beyond the swamp, beyond the grazing nebri and khireks and landstriders and gently trilling water-birds. I would try to imagine what this world would be like when Jen and I were gone.
Not so different, I would usually think. I had never known a world filled with gelflings. My earliest memory was of my mother's death. There were other memories that I sometimes saw in dreamfastings, but like all dreamfastings they were faint, flickers and impressions, not the clear, hard vision that was my mother's face.
Jen and I were only two. Thra would not break without us.
I wondered if I should feel sad, if I should rage against the dying of my own people, weep for a future world of gelflings that would never be and for a past that I could not remember. I tried, but it was as raging against the sun, or the wind. Our people had had their time on Thra, and it was ending.
I am sure Jen thought the same things, though he did not speak them aloud. His habit of quietness had grown since we began building our village. There were times when I longed for a gift of words from him, but he said much with a look and a touch, and usually I did not find myself wanting.
The gelfling village grew under our careful hands. Not as it had been—it was being rebuilt by podling hands, with podling sensibilities—but beautiful, bringing back memories that were not entirely mine. On the night before the last stone was put into place I asked Jen to sleep there with me, with the stars shining down on us through the mixture of vines and wood that made up the roof. We slept, and dreamfasted, and it was as though a thousand grateful voices long silenced awoke to whisper me to sleep. I closed my eyes in the peace of remembering.