Dichotomy defined her entire existence: being neither of the living nor the dead. She persisted in a perpetual state of purgatory, for a sin she wasn't privy to. Long ago, she lived a quiet life as the daughter of a chartophylax in the service of ancient emperors – a meticulous, tender archiver of history. He believed that memory, if preserved, could outlive sorrow.
Her name long ago was Theaphanïa. It was written once, carefully, on a birth scroll, then shelved amongst a thousand others.
She had no prophecy, no expectation.
She lived quietly. There was no curse, no divine interruption, no bargain, no blood—just a night and the next morning.
Nothing changed.
Not her breath. Not her reflection. Not the day. Not the week. Not the year. Not the century.
She stayed the same outwardly, as the face of the moon itself remained unchanged.
As she aged, time stretched out and folded back in. Centuries blurred together like ink bleeding on old parchment. The voices she remembered disappeared, their shapes lingering in the spaces they once occupied. Stone cracked, and cities crumbled inward, overgrown and still. Through it all, she remained a monument to a story long forgotten.
What she became—there was no word for it. She never tried to name it. It didn't feel like a crescendo of change, rather like a silence that had settled in.
She walks through an age that doesn't recognize her. Ancient streets tangle and change like a woman's hair. Languages are shaped like glacial valleys, echoing with old songs hummed from memory, missing half their notes.
To strangers, she's just a passing figure—a woman in quiet clothing, standing too long in the refractions of stained glass, or seated beneath worn stone columns, gone before the next bell.
She never speaks of where she came from, not because it wounds her, but because it deserves better than casual mention.
She believes it's still there—changed, quiet, breathing beneath the noise.
No grave to bear her name. No epitaph. No memory. Only remnants.
A sketch of a courtyard that no longer exists. A phrase in a tongue older than the wall it was carved into. She writes to keep from coming undone. She draws to remember what it means to have form. She watches, not to collect, only to witness.
She's learned to admire endings: the soft, patient way ivy leaves overtake stone; how rain rounds off what was once sharp; how strangers sometimes reach destinations without knowing why.
She doesn't wish for death, but sometimes—in the quieter hours—she dreams of rest, the kind that asks for nothing, and stays long enough to matter.
Until then… she wanders. Not to be seen, not to be remembered, but to remain.
And if these words she writes survive, if they end up in someone's hands, and something in them touches that deep, unnamed ache—the one that feels like memory without a source—let that be enough.
She didn't mean to write all of this. She never does. But tonight… her story spoke to be wrought, and maybe she let it.