The Etra Anthology

97th of Nemulum, 336 EA

Ishikar, Athal

Belmaia needed her tears to be kept to herself, and so she climbed up to the undershodden roof of the temple.

She had hoped to be alone, but instead she found that great winking eye of the crescent moon staring down at her. She would settle for it’s presence.

Between sobs, she gazed out over the great grassy knoll there that she had planted herself in all those long years ago. At it’s edge she could see the forests she had wound her way through and the aether that had taken her.

It was a muted mass, the aether. She knew it well enough too, just as the glade and the temple. It was space beyond space, a bank of mist meant to curtain one world from the next. Her belief in the Stria Intranscendent, that patron faith to wanderers, gave her some affinity for it despite it’s dangers. She walked it most days. Looking out then she thought for a moment that perhaps she had let too much of it in, had become too much like it. That clinging fog was hollow, like water, and hallowed, like rain.

An ominous rustling broke her from her wallow. She wiped away her dejection, but not quickly enough to escape Livia.

“Hey?” The waifish woman drifted across the rooftop, framed in silver like moonlight. “Are you alright?”

Belmaia considered for a moment airing out her pain, but it was hard in that moment to ignore what Livia was. She was a frail sort of thin, wispy and made more so with every day that passed, and on top of that she was trying to move on. She was always going, endlessly never leaving. Livia would come back, Belmaia knew that for sure, but she’d not be the same. Some part of her would be gone, just like the last time and the time before that.

It was foul, that repetition that Belmaia craved. She knew it to be so, deep down, but she simply could not allow herself to face it headlong. Instead, she chose to pull herself further into the illusion that these things were as they should be. “It’s nothing. I’m just taking some air, is all.”

Belmaia let her gaze drift back to the aether, she nestled herself further into the heart of the home she had built to keep herself forever stable, and she willed herself veilwoven.