The permission slip called it an "Educational Excursion to Fort Everstand, a preserved historical treasure!" The bus ride was filled with the kind of electric excitement only children on a field trip can generate.
"I brought three juice boxes!" Chloe announced, patting her backpack.
"I brought my measuring tape," Leo said, holding up the cloth tape his grandfather had lent him. "For the arrow slits."
Mrs. Evans, sitting beside Astraea, smiled down at her. "Excited, sweetie? I remember my first field trip. We went to a bread factory."
"I am… anticipating new perspectives," Astraea said, which was true.
The "historic" site was Fort Everstand, a stone fortress perched on a cliff overlooking the river. According to the CYAP brochure, it was "a centuries-old testament to humanity's resilience, standing guard over our history."
According to Astraea's memory, it was built between 1712 and 1719 CE by a paranoid lord named Everstand who was more concerned with tax collection than invasion. She'd watched the construction from a nearby hill, a convenient resting spot during one of her slow, starving migrations across the continent.
"Look at those ancient stones!" Teacher Milly breathed as the bus pulled into the paved parking lot, now lined with picnic tables and a gift shop. "Think of all the history they've seen!"
Astraea thought of the stones being quarried from the riverbank, the shouts of the workers, the smell of wet mortar and sweat. She thought of Lord Everstand visiting once, complaining the central tower wasn't imposing enough, then leaving and never returning.
"Everyone stay with your buddy!" Milly chirped, handing out neon vests that clashed horribly with the historical ambiance. "Leo and Astraea, you're together! Hold hands for safety!"
Leo took her hand, his grip slightly damp with excitement. "My grandpa drew me a diagram of proper defensive architecture. He says if the arrow slits are wrong, the whole design is suspect."
"He's correct," Astraea said without thinking. "These are too wide. Designed for show, not for archers."
Leo blinked at her. "How do you know?"
Because I watched an actual archer—a man named Eli with a whiskey habit and a missing front tooth—curse about them for a full afternoon while getting drunk on cheap wine. "I… saw a documentary," she amended. "About castle design."
The tour guide was a young woman in period costume—a highly sanitized, clean version of 18th-century dress that would have made any real fort-dweller laugh. "Welcome, young Light-Bearers, to Fort Everstand! Built over three hundred years ago to protect the river trade route from bandits and… um… rival factions!"
From tax evaders and disgruntled tenants, Astraea silently corrected as they passed through the gatehouse.
"See the murder holes above!" the guide said, pointing at square openings in the stone ceiling. "Defenders would drop stones or hot oil on invaders!"
Chloe gasped, clutching Astraea's other hand. "That's mean!"
"It was for protection, sweetie," Mrs. Evans said gently from behind them.
Astraea kept her face carefully neutral. Leo, however, was measuring the arrow slit with his tape. "These are fifteen centimeters wide at the narrowest," he muttered. "An English longbow arrow is about one centimeter. These are… windows, not slits."
She felt a surge of affection for his precise, questioning mind. He was seeking truth, even here, in this temple to comfortable fiction.
The climax of the tour was the central courtyard, where a photographer was set up with props. "For just fifteen dollars," the guide announced, "you can get a commemorative photo dressed as a historic guard or lady of the fort! Capture your own piece of history!"
The children erupted in excitement. Parents dug out wallets.
Astraea hung back as her classmates donned oversized helmets and held plastic swords. Chloe grinned behind a large painted shield with a cartoonish lion on it. Sam struggled with a faux fur cloak over his jacket, his thermal senses probably going wild from the synthetic material.
"Don't you want a picture, Astraea?" Mrs. Evans asked, her phone already out. "You'd make a cute historical guard."
"I'll watch," Astraea said softly. "I like observing."
She watched as children posed before the ancient stones, smiling brightly in their costumes. The photographer, a bored-looking teenager, called out, "Look tough! You're defending history!"
Flash. Click.
Astraea remembered the real guards. Bored men, often cold, playing dice games against these very walls. One, a boy no older than sixteen with a hacking cough, had carved his sweetheart's initial into a stone near the well. She wondered if it was still there, under layers of preservation varnish and centuries of weather.
A tourist nearby aimed a high-end camera at the battlements. "Get the whole thing, Martha," he said to his wife. "The brochure says it's one of the best-preserved examples of pre-Awakening military architecture."
His wife snapped the photo, capturing the fort against the cloudy sky. "It's so authentic."
Authentic, Astraea thought. The word tasted strange. The fort was real stone, real mortar. But the history presented was a ghost, a pleasant echo with the pain, boredom, and petty human motives carefully removed. It was authentic the way a painted backdrop was a landscape.
"It's weird," Leo said, appearing beside her, his photo forgotten. He was looking at the wide arrow slit again. "If you were an invader, you could just shoot right back through that. It's not defensive. It's… decorative."
"Lord Everstand was more concerned with appearance than function," Astraea said quietly, quoting the man's own steward from a conversation she'd overheard. "He wanted to look powerful to the merchants on the river, not actually be powerful."
Leo looked at her sharply, but before he could ask how she knew that, Milly called for everyone to gather for a group photo.
Astraea was pulled to the front, a tiny plastic helmet placed lopsidedly on her head. She held a shield that smelled of dust and plastic.
"Everyone say 'History!'" the photographer called, his enthusiasm clearly forced.
"HISTORY!" the children chorused, some waving their plastic swords.
Flash. Click.
In the photo, she knew, she would look like any other child—smiling slightly, eyes bright. No one would see the ancient being inside, the one who remembered the real weight of the stones, the real sound of the mason's hammer, the real, unphotographable truth of the past.
On the bus ride home, tired and buzzing with sugar from the "historical honey cakes" sold at the gift shop, Leo showed her his notebook. He'd drawn the fort's layout, with careful measurements and question marks by all the design flaws. "My grandpa's gonna love this," he said, his eyes bright. "He says history is in the details everyone else ignores."
Astraea looked out the window as the fort shrank in the distance, a silhouette against the modern city it now "guarded." Mrs. Evans dozed beside her, her head gently bumping against the window.
"He's right," Astraea said. "The truth is always in the cracks. In the things that don't fit the story."
[System notification!]
[Quest complete: 'Field trip fun!']
[Objective: Participate in a community cultural excursion!]
[Reward: 'Culture appreciator' Title, +5 to Social stat]
[New daily quest: 'Share your trip!' -- Tell someone one thing you learned!]
[Note: Exploring history helps us understand our place in the world!]
Astraea didn't share what she'd learned. She couldn't. The truth—that history was a living, breathing, often messy thing she had walked through—was not for a Luminous Child's show-and-tell.
That night, she didn't measure her height immediately. She stood by her window, looking at the city lights, thinking of other lights—campfires, torchlight, the faint glow of lanterns in a fortress that was now a photo opportunity.
Her back itched. The wing buds hummed, a song older than the fort, older than the kings, older than the very idea of history in a brochure.
She finally turned to the wall, marked her place, and measured.
0.39 cm cumulative.
She was growing. Not just in height, but in memory, in presence. While humans built narratives on top of the past, she was the past, growing quietly into the future.
Tomorrow: more present. The day after: more past. The great continuum of her being stretched, connecting the then to the now, invisible to all but her.