Tempis Fugit

She did not leave.

Ysara remained in the Temple Wing, a spire of pale stone and polished obsidian overlooking the lower district of Cael-Ezra. Once reserved for relic-keepers and visiting dignitaries, the wing had long sat unused, its fountains dry and its circuit-embedded walls silent. Within days, it changed.

Veiled lanterns hung from the arches like suspended moons. The air smelled of frankincense and something rarer—burnt myrrh and desert resin, scent memories that did not belong to the city. She lit a hundred oil lamps at night, their flames dancing across ancient glyphs etched into the floor, creating a galaxy of restless shadows.

The priests came first—drawn by her voice in the evening hours, when she sang alone in the antechamber with no accompaniment. Then came the orphans, bringing trinkets, curious and barefoot. She fed them herself. She knew their names by the second visit.

And Elandor came, not for reasons he could name.

Their meetings became longer. Less formal. More dangerous.

They began in the garden, where the relic trees bloomed in winter’s algorithms. She would ask him questions that no one else dared. He would answer in fragments, letting the silence between words stretch longer each day. Sometimes they spoke of war. Sometimes of the past. And sometimes they said nothing, letting the hum of the city fill the void.

“Do you remember the first time you tasted ash?” she asked him once, kneeling beside a basin of still water.

He had paused, caught off guard. “The siege of Vanthelis,” he said. “I was in my nineteenth cycle.”

“Was it bitter?”

“I thought it was what victory tasted like.”

She didn’t laugh, but her smile was knowing. “And now?”

He looked away. “Now I know it never leaves the tongue.”

She rose and stepped closer. “Then why keep tasting it?”

He didn’t answer at first.

There were no guards nearby. No advisors listening through the walls. Just the low hum of the city breathing—living, dying, dreaming.

“I used to think the world owed me,” he said. “That the crown was my burden, my penance, and my prize. That peace could be achieved by force, if I just held long enough. But the more I won, the more I lost.”

“You lost yourself,” she said. Not unkindly.

He nodded. “And found nothing in the ashes but a throne built from ghosts.”

She knelt again at the basin and dipped her hand into the water. It rippled with prismatic light, refracting old code, half-forgotten prayers, half-remembered faces.

“What if peace isn’t something to win?” she said. “What if it’s something you choose, over and over, even when the war is screaming for your name?”

He studied her, as if seeing her for the first time.

“I never knew anyone like you,” he said, the words slipping out before he could filter them.

Her fingers moved through the water in slow arcs. “That’s because I don’t belong to anyone.”

He sat beside her. Close, but not touching.

“Have you always been like this?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “Once, I wanted to be chosen. Praised. Loved. I thought being needed was the same as being seen.”

“And now?”

“Now I know that the truest kind of love asks for nothing back.”

He looked at her, searching for the flaw in the logic, the motive in the music. But there was nothing to find—only her. As she was.

She glanced at him, the corner of her mouth lifting slightly. “Does that frighten you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Because I think I’m beginning to understand it.”

She turned back to the water. “Then you’re further than most.”

They watched the lamps begin to dim, heard drones quieting in the distance, as the garden synced to lunar drift and the relic trees folded their leaves inward like hands in prayer.

After a brief silence, she asked, “When you silence your court and lock the gates, who are you protecting—your people, or yourself?”

“I am the boundary between ruin and order,” he said. “If I falter—”

“If you falter,” she interrupted gently, “perhaps what follows was never meant to be held back.”

For many nights, Ysara sang alone. And Elandor would listen from the shadows. Some nights, he would remain long after the song had ended, long enough to ask her a question in return.

“Who taught you to see people like that?”

She tilted her head. “Like what?”

“Like they’re already forgiven.”

II - The Song of Elandor

The air in the throne room shifted as the visitor entered.

She moved like wind across glass—desert silks clinging to her form, rustling as if in response to a rhythm only she could hear. Crimson and copper hues caught the gold light pouring from the dome above, casting fire across her veil. Each step echoed—not loud, not forced—but careful and measured.

When she reached the foot of the throne, she paused and bowed—not deeply, not submissively, but as one paying respect to a power she did not fear. Then she removed her veil.

Her skin was bronzed by the sun and scarred in places where the sand bites hardest. Her hair fell in black waves, crowned with a simple band of gold. Her face bore no signs of youth’s illusion nor age’s defeat—only stillness, and something that glimmered just beneath it. Sorrow, perhaps. Or memory.

“I am Ysara,” she said, her voice low and resonant, like the echoes of a temple left long abandoned. “Of the Southern Expanse. I bring no weapon but truth.”

Elandor tilted his head slightly. “Truth is more dangerous than steel.”

“Only to men who fear it.”

A ripple passed through the gathered guards and scribes. Tirzah’s jaw tightened. But the king did not move.

“And what truth do you carry across a continent, Ysara of the dunes?”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “The truth that peace has made you brittle. That this kingdom sleeps while the stars shift. You are not a king anymore. You are a warden of ash.”

The silence that followed was sharp and immediate. Several soldiers shifted their feet. One of the scribes stopped recording altogether. Tirzah stepped forward, hand brushing the grip of her plasma sidearm.

But Elandor only smiled, standing slowly. The throne creaked as he left it, the obsidian beneath his boots echoing like distant thunder.

“And yet you’ve come to speak with ash?”

Ysara tilted her head. “Perhaps ash still remembers the flame it once was.”

He studied her for a long moment. Then: “Walk with me.”

Tirzah motioned to protest, but Elandor locked eyes with her and they had a mutual understanding that she could follow at a distance.

The king and the visitor stepped through one of the side arches, descending into the heart of the palace—into the sunken gardens that bloomed beneath its foundation. The corridors narrowed, lit by veins of living light that pulsed in the walls, echoing the breath of some ancient, sleeping machine. Eventually, they emerged into a domed atrium open to the skies.

Here, relic trees grew out of nutrient basins, their bark etched with shimmering glyphs. Bioluminescent flowers bloomed in defiance of the dying light. A soft mist hung in the air, rich with metallic pollen. In the distance, the faint chirp of auto-pollinators and the hum of restoration drones.

The sun was low on the horizon, painting the sky in violet and amber.

Ysara moved with quiet reverence, trailing her fingers over a flower that opened to her touch, casting a soft blue glow across her wrist.

“You’ve forgotten how to listen,” she said softly.

Elandor leaned against a stone balustrade. “To the flowers?”

“To the world.”

He crossed his arms. “You speak like a priestess. I’ve silenced gods before.”

She turned to face him, her smile faint. “And yet you are haunted.”

That struck something in him, though he did not say it. He watched her for a long beat—watched the light play across her face like a memory he couldn’t quite name.

“I do not seek to undo you, Elandor,” she said, her voice quieter now. “I seek to awaken you.”

“Awaken me to what?”

“To what comes next.”

A tremor passed through him, almost imperceptible.

She stepped closer. The scent of her—smoke, myrrh, wind off the southern dunes—wrapped around him like memory.

“You rule by force, but the world is shifting beneath your feet,” she whispered. “The children of your conquests grow restless. The stars themselves murmur of change. You cannot hold it back forever.”

“And what would you have me do?” His voice was low, but steady. “Abdicate? Kneel?”

“No,” she said. “I would have you remember who you were before the crown.”

He raised a hand—almost touched her face—but stopped.

“That man is dead.”

She leaned in, close enough to feel the breath of her words.

“Then let me show you how to resurrect him.”

Elandor didn’t answer. Not at first. He looked away, gaze fixed on the tree at the center of the garden, its leaves shifting color with every breath of wind. Then, quietly, without looking at her:

“There was a time when I would walk these halls barefoot. When I still believed that peace was something one could craft, like stone or steel.” He exhaled slowly. “I remember the night I forged my first blade. Not of iron, but of thought. A declaration: Elandor will not be broken. I made that vow when my brothers were taken from me. When I stood alone.”

“That vow served you,” she said gently. “But it has become your prison.”

He looked at her now, really looked. “You speak as if you know what it means to carry a realm on your spine.”

“I do not,” she admitted. “But I know what it means to be shaped by pain. To be remade by it until you forget the shape of your soul.”

The king’s jaw clenched.

“I know you remember that night in Sahradan. The temple was burning. Burned by your orders.” Her voice was not cruel, only precise. “You dragged me from the flames, and you said—” She paused, and her voice softened. “You said, ‘No more dying for things we’ve already lost.’”

His eyes closed, and the years rushed in. He remembered the campaign in the Southern Expanse—the taste of ash on the wind, the howl of dying engines, the temple consumed in flames like a beacon for forgotten gods. Images flickered at the edge of memory: broken idols, sun-bleached bones, prayers carved into the stone with blood and wire. But no face. No name.

No Ysara.

His mind, eroded by decades of war and attrition, searched the haze—and found only silence.

Could it be true? he wondered.

“That was before I learned how much one can still lose.” She continued, stepping beside him at the balustrade. Their shoulders nearly touched. “There is still a part of you that listens. That watches the wind move through leaves and wonders what it means.”

“I buried that part.” Elandor admitted frankly.

“No,” she said. “You armored it.”

A long silence.

Then Elandor whispered, “What if I don’t know how to be anyone else?”

“You don’t need to know yet,” she replied. “You only need to want to.”

His hand hovered again—then slowly, tentatively, rested on the stone beside hers.

The Song of Elandor

“You should come down from that throne sometime,” Tirzah said, arms crossed over her chest, her voice clipped like iron striking stone. “You're starting to look embalmed.”

Elandor said nothing. He remained hunched forward, elbows resting on knees, crown casting a long shadow across his brow. His dark eyes scanned the vast hall before him, vacant but for flickers of torchlight and the faint hum of the old city’s core generators beneath.

He exhaled slowly, voice low. “It’s too quiet.”

Tirzah paced a slow half-circle around the throne’s dais, the sound of her boots echoing against obsidian and glass.

“You asked for quiet,” she reminded him. “Now you have it.”

Elandor gave a dry laugh, bitter as old wine. “Peace is a strange reward. It tastes like ash.”

She smirked. “Would you rather be back in the Eastern Wastes, ribs broken, half your men dead, commanding from a crater with a bleeding map and two hours of light left?”

“There was clarity in bloodshed. Simplicity.” He rubbed a calloused thumb across the pommel of the sword resting at his side. “Purpose.”

Then, with a cadence that was too practiced, Tirzah began to recite softly:

“When smoke curled above the Vale of Veth,

He stood unbroken, blade in breath.

Ten thousand fell for the price of one,

And the ash did bloom where he’d begu—”

“Stop,” he said stiffly.

Tirzah blinked. “It’s one of my favorites about your—”

“It’s a lie,” he said, more quietly. “I don’t remember standing. I remember crawling. I remember choking on the smoke and ordering the retreat three times before they even heard me.”

A silence fell between them, heavier than the one she had offered him.

She turned toward him then, studying his profile—creased, haunted, more human than legend.

“So which part do they carve into the monument?” she asked gently. “The crawling? Or the ten thousand?”

He didn’t answer.

Tirzah halted beside a column etched with the names of his fallen generals. “That purpose brought us here.”

“Did it?” Elandor looked up at her, eyes sharper now. “Or did it bring me here?”

Before she could answer, the chamber doors swung open on hissing pneumatic hinges, and a herald in white approached. His long robe glimmered with threadbare circuits—remnants of a priesthood that once served the stars.

“Your Majesty,” the herald said with a formal bow, “a traveler from the Southern Dunes seeks audience. Alone. No retinue. No arms. She requests parley under the rites of the Old Accord.”

Tirzah frowned. “A beggar?”

The herald hesitated. “A sārām, she claims. A seer.”

Elandor leaned back, lips curling slightly. “Interesting. Let her in.”

“Elandor—” Tirzah began.