Location:Seven Peaks — Overlook
Date/Time:TC1854.12.31 (Midnight)
Two years.
Raven stood on the overlook at midnight and counted the time the way she counted everything — not in days or months but in what the days and months had built. Two years since she'd opened her eyes in a 17-year-old body with 99 lifetimes of memory and a world that needed saving. Two years since a girl named Mara Brenner stopped existing and a woman named Raven began.
The mountain was quiet. Not the quiet of absence — the quiet of 35,000 people sleeping. The Midwinter fires had burned to embers six days ago. The festival lanterns had been taken down, carefully, stored for next year because the Charter's resource guidelines specified that beautiful things should be reused rather than discarded. The ordinary had returned — the schedule, the training, the reports, the work of maintaining a nation that required maintenance because nations did.
