The golden lake rippled gently in the eternal twilight of Antithesis. Aurenya sat at its edge, her bare feet dangling in the warm, luminous water, watching the strange bugs that shimmered just beneath the surface.
"They're dancing again," she murmured to herself, leaning closer.
Around her, the realm blazed with radiance beyond mortal comprehension. The split sky above showed its eternal division. One side burning red like fire, the other shimmering silver-blue like frost. Between them stretched the golden expanse where she dwelled, alone.
Her sisters had gone to fight the chaos creatures again. Kaelira with her flames crackling, Syralis with frost trailing in her wake, and all the others, hundreds of golden-winged Saelari born from the quieter Trees. They protected the sealed boundaries of their realm from the horrors that clawed at its edges, leaving her behind because she was too weak, too fragile to face such terrors.
Beloved but useless. Cherished but unable to help.
Aurenya traced patterns in the golden water with her toes, humming a melody that made the air shimmer faintly around her. The sound echoed across the empty realm, bouncing off the luminous trees and fading into silence.
"Hello?" she called out to the glowing forest. "Virelya? Will you speak to me today?"
The Tree of Flame stood tall in the distance, its branches like burning veins, leaves flickering in an unfelt wind. But as always, it gave no answer. None of the Trees ever spoke to her, no matter how she pleaded.
She was about to call out again when something else reached her, a voice, low and rough yet softened with an odd gentleness, as though spoken to someone impossibly near.
"It was a long day..."
Aurenya's head snapped up, flame-bright eyes widening. Something about that voice... She looked around the empty realm, seeing nothing, no one. But the voice continued, carrying a strange weight she couldn't understand.
"How are you doing? My mother died today. She was kind, told me stories about angels, how they grant wishes to good children."
A flicker of recognition sparked in her mind, a past memory, but something deeper. She had heard this voice before, long ago, breaking in desperation: "Please... heal my mother." Back then, she had not known who he was, nor how to answer what he begged for. The voice had been younger then, raw with grief and hope, calling to something called an angel.
Now it was deeper, steadier, but she knew with sudden certainty it was the same person, though no longer the desperate youth who had once pleaded into the void.
"Who are you?" she whispered to the luminous air. "What are you?" The voice belonged to some kind of creature she had never encountered before, something that existed beyond her understanding. But he never heard her. She always tried to talk to him. But her words never reached him. Still, she could hear him clearly, somewhere impossibly distant yet close enough that she could hear every inflection.
He told her stories.
Aurenya's wings fluttered with excitement as she listened.
"Are you lonely too? Is that why you keep talking even when you can't hear me?"
Each tale was painted in light. Each was about others, never himself. And she drank in every word like nectar, her luminous world brightening in ways that even celestial radiance could not achieve.
Aurenya hummed responses he couldn't hear, waved her feet back and forth in the golden lake, and whispered questions into the glowing air.
"Do you know how we measure time in Leonhelm?" his voice asked the darkness wherever he was.
Aurenya's eyes glittered sometimes, and sometimes she blinked. Her flamelike red golden wings fluttered with something she couldn't name. "Helmra..." she whispered, tasting the word. "The month he was born... Helmfrost..." Her face flushed as she realized she had learned something intimate about her mysterious storyteller. "The frost of his... Is it cold like Nhalrien? I want to touch..."
She covered her mouth quickly, glancing around in shame as if checking whether anyone had heard her strange longing. But no one was around, no one responded to her. She alone inhabited this small world. By now she had learned everything about this place. she would wander, hugging different trees for warmth, sometimes she would jump around branches, sometimes she would fly around. But soon she got bored. Until the voice came back again... She felt curious about the creature talking to her, telling her stories. The world he spoke of seemed so vast, where many people lived, where everyone talked to others. No one was left alone...
When silence finally returned after his talk, she would remain by the golden lake, staring up at the split sky above. The absence of the voice felt strange now, like a sudden dimming of light she hadn't realized she'd grown accustomed to.
Days passed in Antithesis. Her sisters would return eventually from their battles. The Trees continued their eternal silence. But now Aurenya found herself waiting for something else entirely.
By the golden lake she would sit, trailing her fingers through the luminous water, and whisper to herself the strange new words she had learned. "Helmra," she would say, rolling the sound around her mouth. "Frost that melts when you touch it." She pressed her warm palms together, trying to imagine coldness, trying to picture something that could disappear at her touch.
"Children," she murmured to the glowing bugs beneath the water's surface. "What are children?" She had asked this countless times, but the luminous creatures born from grasses, offered no answers, only their endless, silent dance. He said they were small and loved. What was love?
Sometimes she would lie on her back in the golden grass, staring up at the split sky, and try to imagine this thing called a moon. A silver lantern that changed shape, that grew full and faded to nothing, only to return. "Always changing, always faithful," she repeated, the words becoming a kind of prayer. In her world of endless radiance, the concept of darkness was as foreign as the concept of change.
"Luna," she whispered, testing the name. What would it be like to see something that wasn't eternal, something that moved and shifted and disappeared?
Again and again she found herself returning to the image of the marketplace, the girl with pollen-stained hands selling flowers wrapped in something called paper. Aurenya would sit by Virelya's base, plucking fire-blossoms from the lower branches, trying to imagine what it would be like to have her hands stained with their essence, to offer them to others for something called trade.
"What is paper? I want to see the golden castle he talks about. and night market. " she asked the flame Tree, but Virelya remained silent as always. "Are you talking to me, but I just can't hear you? Like the storyteller?" She made her excuses on Virelya's behalf. "I am born from you, so are you my mother? The creature said everyone is born from their mothers. If you are my mother, why do you not talk to me, but talk to Kaelira? Everyone hears from their mother, why leave me out?"
The strangest thing now was how the stories made her restless. Before, she had been content to sit and wait, to hum her melodies and watch the eternal dance of light and shadow across her realm. But now she found herself wandering farther than usual, to the edges where the golden trees met the frost streams, where they bordered the flame meadows.
The stories began to seep into her body, shaping her in ways the eternal light never had. When the voice spoke of soft creatures with whiskers and fur, cats, he called them. Aurenya spent hours hugging the golden bugs by the lake, trying to pretend they purred. "Miku," she whispered again and again, clutching handfuls of grass to her chest, longing for the warmth of this unseen being.
When he told of gardens heavy with fruit, she found herself suddenly desperate to taste. She plucked a leaf from Virelya and chewed slowly, waiting for sweetness, juice, something new. But there was nothing, no flavor, no satisfaction. The leaf dissolved into warmth that was already part of her, no different than breathing. She tried again and again, until at last she would seat by the lake with her chin on her knees, whispering, "What does sweet mean?"
Cloth, he said, could warm or adorn, made by hands with needle and thread. Looking down at her own covering, woven of Virelya's flame-leaves, she tore them away. They flared in her hands but never harmed her, vanishing into harmless embers. Laughing at her own boldness, she gathered golden leaves from the lower branches, weaving them clumsily around her body, sometimes even daring to steal frost-fronds from Nhalrien's edge. The golden leaves clung like sunlight, the frost ones left her shivering, but neither felt like the fabric he spoke of. Still, she wore them anyway, twirling as though they could make her belong to his world of weavers and market stalls.
Yet no matter what she did, she remained only Aurenya in her unchanging world. The voice would return, and she would listen, but each time he left, the ache grew sharper. The golden lake and endless sky no longer seemed vast, they felt like walls closing in. Strangest of all, the longing now had a shape. It was not simply for answers, or for the voice itself. She wanted to leap into that other world, walk barefoot where children laughed, hold Miku in her arms, taste fruit that carried joy, watch the moon change and disappear and return.
At these boundaries she would stand and wonder: what lay beyond? The storyteller's voice came from somewhere impossibly distant, but where? Was there truly a place where children ran barefoot through streets that smelled of rain? Where old men built chimes from broken armor? Where lovers met under the light of a changing moon?
At night, though night and day held little meaning in Antithesis, she would curl up beneath the golden trees and replay every word she remembered. She had now learned to feel the time he would talk to her again. After she made 1442 rounds in the sky, made 164 jumps across the lake and picked 682 petals from Virelya, he came back to talk to her, telling her stories.
The boy skipping stones across glass-clear rivers. The village with lantern-light floating skyward. The wind chimes singing through storms.
Each story felt like a door cracked open to reveal wonders beyond imagining. Each silence afterward felt like that door closing again, leaving her in the luminous quiet of her eternal realm.
"Will you come back?" she whispered to the empty air during these waiting times. "Will you tell me more about the girl with flower-stained hands? About the villages that smell like bread? Or different times? I want to hear about Miku more."
The golden lake rippled in response to her voice, carrying her words into the light, but she knew, somehow, that her storyteller couldn't hear them. Just as she couldn't reach across whatever vast distance separated them to touch the frost of Helmra or taste the bread he spoke of.
But she would wait. She had learned patience in her realm of endless radiance, but now that patience carried a new weight, expectation. Hope, perhaps, though she had no name for the feeling.
And in the spaces between his stories, she was learning to treasure mystery itself, the beautiful ache of wondering about worlds she could never see, voices she could never answer, and the strange, impossible creature who painted pictures with words in the darkness beyond her light.
At first Aurenya begged the Trees themselves. She pressed her forehead against Virelya's glowing trunk, whispering, pleading: "Please, talk to me. Show me what he sees. Let me understand." She wrapped her arms around the burning branches, waiting for some response, an echo, a tremor, a word. But Virelya never answered. None of the Trees ever did. Their silence was as endless as the sky, and she could not understand why they would not share the things she longed to know.
---
[Emerald Castle, Prince Alden's Study]
The afternoon light filtered through the tall windows of Prince Alden's study, casting long shadows across the polished marble floor. Maps and correspondence lay scattered across his desk in careful disorder. The kind of chaos that looked random but served a purpose.
Limon burst through the door with barely contained excitement, his usual busy demeanor cracking under the weight of important news. "Your Highness, we got a response from the High Elves of Aethelgard!" He rushed forward, practically bouncing on his feet. "They said they also wish to meet you. Whenever you wish, you will be welcomed, here's their response."
Prince Alden took the sealed letter with the same expression he might use for a mundane tax report. His dark eyes scanned the elegant script, the flowing Elvish characters that seemed to shimmer faintly in the afternoon light. No surprise crossed his features, no satisfaction at this diplomatic breakthrough that should have been impossible.
Limon continued his excited murmuring, unable to contain his curiosity. "But why do you want to meet them in secret, Your Highness? And it's even more strange that a reclusive race like them agreed without any questions or explanation. I don't understand..."
Alden finished reading the letter methodically, letting Limon speak his mind without interruption. When the aide finally fell silent, he asked, "The progress in the other tasks I gave you?"
Limon hesitantly handed him a report, much larger in size, and whispered, "This is all the information I could find about paralysis poison, symptoms and their cure from different mages, alchemists and elementalists."
Alden started reading through them quietly. After glancing through all the pages, he placed the report on his desk with deliberate precision. Then, without looking up, he motioned toward the door. "Come in."
Limon spun around, startled. The door hadn't made a sound, yet Elara slowly entered the room, moving with the careful grace of someone whose joints protested every step. Her silver hair was pulled back in its usual severe bun, but wisps had escaped to frame her weathered face. She paused just inside the threshold, hands clasped before her.
"Your Highness," she said softly, "how did you know? I just arrived."
Alden didn't respond to her question. Instead, he gestured for her to continue, his expression remaining neutral but attentive, as always.
Elara drew a shaky breath. "Your Highness, I am getting old and weak. Now that Her Majesty is no more, this old lady doesn't wish for anything but to rest..." Her voice wavered slightly. "I was thinking... if I should retire."
The silence that followed was profound. Limon shifted uncomfortably, sensing the weight of unspoken history in the room. Alden gazed at Elara with his deep, dark eyes, as if he could read the very depths of her soul. When he finally spoke, his words were measured and deliberate.
"Elara..." His voice was soft, almost vulnerable. "After my mother left me, do you wish to leave me too?"
The question hung in the air like a physical thing. Limon felt his chest tighten, tears pricking at his eyes as he witnessed his prince, usually so controlled and commanding, reveal such raw emotion.
Elara's composure crumbled entirely. Tears streamed down her weathered cheeks as she shook her head frantically. "Your Highness, leave you? How could I?" Her voice broke with each word. "Since Her Majesty was bedridden, raising you has been the only blessing of my life. It's just... you are still so grief-stricken, I thought, maybe my presence is making you more pained by Her Majesty's departure."
Her voice rose with desperate emotion. "All these years, you desperately looked for a cure even when you yourself were anything but a child, even while practicing swordsmanship and fulfilling all the required duties of the sole heir." She wiped at her eyes with shaking hands, but the tears kept coming. "Now even after her death, seeing you still cannot move on, trying to find the cure and reason for Her Majesty's paralysis..." She glanced apologetically at Limon. "Your Highness... you have suffered so much... Please, now move on and live your life, choose a bride... get engaged...be happy..."
Tears streamed down her face as the words poured out, years of worry and maternal concern finally given voice. She had watched this boy grow into a young man while carrying burdens that would have broken lesser souls. She barely continued, "Just... rest a bit... please..." Then finally in a trembling voice, she whispered, "You have... worked hard."
Alden looked at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then, with deliberate slowness, he picked up the huge report on paralysis poison, the result of Limon's months of painstaking research, and held it over the flame of a nearby candle. The report caught fire instantly, the pages curling into ash as the flames consumed the work. Elara was startled. Fearing Alden's hands might get burned, she tried to rush to take the flaming report from his hands, but her aged body moved slowly. Limon held her back in a calm hug, realizing Alden's wish.
Alden calmly gazed at them, showing no sign of pain from the burn, even though the leather glove on his finger started to char and shrink, and his fingertip began to turn red as the material burned away.
He then closed his eyes as if thinking deeply about something only he could understand. The destroyed report continued to burn between his fingers until only ash remained.
Finally, he opened his eyes and fixed Elara with a penetrating stare. "Elara," he said quietly while slowly removing his charred gloves and putting on a new pair, "you didn't answer my question."
The old woman's shoulders shook as she tried to compose herself. "I... I will do as Your Highness wishes."
"Then don't leave." His words were simple, final. "I still need you."
Limon couldn't bear it anymore. He covered his eyes with his hands and turned toward the corner of the room, his own tears falling freely. The hidden and unspoken emotion of Alden in the scene, the grief, the desperation, the love, was too much to witness directly.
Elara continued crying, her face turned toward the floor as her body shook with silent sobs. The weight of loyalty, of duty, of a mother's love for a child who wasn't hers by blood but was hers in every way that mattered, it all pressed down on her fragile shoulders.
But Alden, who had caused all this with only a few sentences, stared straight at Elara with cold eyes and no expression at all. After dismissing Elara he calmly focused on the papers at hand, before putting them in the drawer.