Welcome to the calm after the storm, for this is my overture.
Athanasia looks up at the sky as the first snowfall of the year flutters down to land upon her eyelashes.
She blinks, her breath leaving her lungs as a hiss into the chilly air, the foggy clouds of breath cut past her cheeks as the wind picks up.
A thin sheen of frost covers pine needles and the grass around her, as if the goddess had sprinkled crushed diamonds to make it glitter as it did under the pale glint of the sun.
The fletched arrow nocked on the magic bow made of bright golden light as she zeroes in on the roughly made target in the distance.
She holds her breath, letting the slight trembling of her fingers still before she lets go and watches it shoot forward with blue sparks jumping upon the pointed tip.
The mana vibrations brush past her cheek as she opens her left eye, letting her eyes focus onto the target that had a new addition in its center.
"The new year...I see..hmm.."
Athanasia's eyes travel upwards before she brushes off the snow that had accumulated on her hair, thinking back on all the times where she had almost yelled up at the skies in question of her numerous rebirths.
Why did you make me live those lives? The unhappy ones, the joyful ones, what was their purpose?
She didn't have a true answer, but still, she persisted, and eventually- she believed.
Believed that perhaps it was to take in experience of how much people didn't change, or did change, or became, or could become, for experience was more useful than being given plucked stars from the night sky.
For there is nothing left once the goddess has left as the savior.
They who were in the wind, the sea, the land.
The sound of their voice that has left a melancholic nostalgia in her heart, with every raindrop that has brought tears to her face for all the memories she has lost and gained, for she- she is precious.
Mikhail stands a little distance away so as not to bother her, but still close enough to keep watch over her movements as she continued to shoot arrows that made high pitched whistles as they shot from her grasp.
The snow that fell around them was light, melting upon contact with his skin but it coated her highness' fingers as she brushed it off.
The snow moved like waves as the wind lifted up the powdery grains of white in a show of an illusion that it was moving over their feet.
He notices her step towards the target to retrieve the arrow whilst not making any indent in the very same snow that crunched under his own weight, and he wonders if she was truly a human like himself and others.
Was she really not a child bestowed to their world by the goddess above?
He thinks of a tale that had been passed down, and thinks she was fitting of the quote at hand, "Think of her golden casket and she will be born anew."
Unbeknownst to his whirling thoughts that didn't show on his face, he doesn't know how close he was to discovering the truth of her origins.
How she had experienced far more than any other person alive, how she was barely alive within the confines of her own mind.
And how Claude is shaken one morning when he wakes to the sense that the very earth was rumbling beneath him.
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