Warnings, disclaimers, etc.
A/N -
- an additional point to Keynote. Links it back into Like Glass and Best Defense, oddly enough.
Her Brother's Fire
Yukina is the oldest Koorime to ever live.
The Koorime are unique in their deaths. Not when it comes to disease, or accident, or childbirth, or murder -- for all those are common in all three worlds, and the Koorime skills with ice don't protect them from blindly walking off a cliff in one of their frequent blizzards -- but when it comes to a natural death, of old age? That's different.
The Koorime slow down as they age. Not from manners in their youth, or arthritis in their dotage, but because their affiliations with ice slowly cause them to freeze. The process takes millenia, during which they go about their business. But slowly, slowly, their steps shorten and grow ever more leaden; their hands fix themselves in clawlike grips, and they are relegated to eating with their fingers. They turn to the kimono worn outside the Glacier by men, wearing fewer layers and tying thinner obi in simple knots.
Eventually, they stop leaving their homes, except for the most formal or dire of events. They spend long hours sitting by windows, reading, and when they can't unroll the scrolls anymore, send their nursemaid for their descendants. They mumble their wills over the course of the next few days, and select one Koorime to keep them company.
This one Koorime reads aloud, or plays music, until the elder's gaze stays pinned into the distance, and they take their last breath.
Few Koorime are mobile after nine thousand years. Even fewer are still breathing at ten thousand.
Yukina, however, once had her brother's fire poured into her veins.
Yukina walks from the Glacier under her own power at 10,500 years old.