LTSV - Lost & Found 45 (Patreon)

In her first life, Mira had been a tall, willowy woman with dark gray eyes and long black hair that spilled all the way down her back and onto the floor. Even with all the braids and bells that her attendants wove into it whenever they dressed her hair, she still had to wear floor length dresses with a train or cape so that her ends wouldn’t drag in the dirt.

She looked down at her floor-length chiton-style gown with a woolen train cape and at the ropey blue scars that wound, serpent-like, around her bare dark olive-toned arms. This illusion had recreated the gold bangles on her wrists and ankles that she’d received as a wedding gift from her husband and her favorite red gown that plunged down to her sternum in the front and parted on the sides to let her walk without worrying about the length of her stride. She wore colorful woven sandals on her feet that had beads of precious stones worked into the straps. Her fingers were adorned with rings of fire opal and diamonds on every finger. Adra had had them made when he understood that rings were a status symbol like earrings and headpieces. 

When they first married, he’d thought rings were just for announcing your relationship status and so had only given her the one as part of their ceremony. Apparently, he thought that you had one ring for each spouse and so he’d had her wedding ring set with the biggest stone she could comfortably wear and then commissioned smaller rings for all her other fingers, so that no other human male thought there was room in their marriage for him. He was extra pissed to learn that Mira’s original culture was monogamous and Peleon wasn’t pursuing her to become her additional husband, but because he thought her marriage to Adra was invalid and so didn’t need to be respected.

Mira looked around, trying to understand where she was. She was in an open space with no discernable floor or ceiling, except for what was directly underfoot. Her hair and jewelry chimed sweetly in time to her movements, so sound carried in here, but she was otherwise in a non-euclidean space—and where was Adra?

That was when the Veiled Goddess arrived. 

Mira recognized the Presence that enveloped her and sank to her knees to bow her head even as cold sweat sprang up all over her body. The stories always made it sound like people kneeled in reverence before the Gods, but in Mira’s experience it was really so she wouldn’t risk falling down. 

In a way, she was friendly with this Goddess, but, really, the Gods were above things like mortal friendships. ‘Friendly’ wasn’t the same as ‘friends.’ Perhaps it was better to say that she respected this Goddess and the Goddess sympathized with her. She would try to answer when Mira asked her questions, but speaking to the Gods was not like speaking to a human. 

They were beyond things like verbal language, but they would try if they thought it was necessary and that the recipient of their words could withstand hearing them. They communicated in short bursts, in concepts that were condensed down to the most simple reply they were capable of. People still died or went mad from trying to understand them. The good news was that this Goddess had a reasonable success rate in not driving the object of her interest into gibbering madness. It also helped that Mira wasn’t quite human anymore, in the cosmological and spiritual sense. She’d been too much changed by her long, repeating lives and that helped her keep herself together even as the Goddess blasted her with a thought that could only be translated roughly as, FEAR NOT.

That was easier said than done, but the Goddess was usually satisfied so long as Mira made an effort. 

With difficulty, Mira calmed her racing heart and formulated a question in the non-language of Gods, as best she could, “Why?”

The Goddess’s presence flexed with amusement. IT IS TIME.

Yes, of course. The question had been too vague. Mira should have known that would be the answer, but she had to try again. She still couldn’t form more than a word or two, unless her heart and mind were in perfect harmony, and even on her second attempt she only managed; “Why this?”

This time the Goddess softened her presence and the pressure around her took on the faint sense of a mother’s embrace. Rather than answer in words, as She had been trying to do, the Goddess showed Mira a flash of memory that doubled and tripled and multiplied in on itself beyond Mira’s ability to absorb or comprehend. It was a bit like being dropped into Escher’s perfect, eternal mirror. 

She didn’t understand until she recognized one of those memories was of herself as Alanamira, leading her men in battle and later falling into the Dark Lake. The other memories were—not quite that, but they were all very similar. Mira saw thousands of iterations of herself rising as a hero, temporarily, before dying in some tragic way and—and the others, all with different faces and names, were there too; fighting against her or trying to capture her or… 

The Goddess withdrew the memory from her and spoke again. IT WAS TOO MUCH AND TOO SAD FOR TOO LONG.

Mira’s head was swimming with what she’d just witnessed. She’d thought her first life as Alanamira was her first life, but it was only one of many in the saga that the Goddess had shown her; one where she repeated the same tragic cycle of a miserable beginning followed by a miserable death, punctuated by a brief moment of glory in the middle. Those pinprick moments of victory were drowned out by all the rest of her suffering when the Goddess tried to show her the entire saga of lives all at once. Even for Mira, it was too much at once. All she could take away from the experience was that she had been born to die in vain in every life and she had been doing it for millenia, maybe even eons.  

Where was Adra in those memories? Mira’s heart hurt and her head hurt and she didn’t understand what the point of all that had been. What good did her suffering buy the universe? It had to have been for a purpose, otherwise she didn’t understand why she’d been made to do it.

She had a sense of a story being told through those lives; one of heroes and a princess and an evil king, told and retold time and time again. Mira played a pivotal part in this archetypal tale, which varied in the details but not in the broad strokes. She was not one of the ‘cast members’ who could expect to have a happy ending. Her tragic death was integral to the Story, but Mira could not see what purpose her bad ending served because she never lived to see the endings. 

Mira also had a feeling that Cecily was always there, just as she had been in all the lives that Mira could remember, along with Adrien, Randall, and the others. Even Adra was there, prior to her death as Alanamira, over and over and over again, until he vanished from the–the Cycle after that life.

No wonder he kept calling their lives that. It was a cycle; the same story being told over and over again in different permutations and new lives, on and on and on. The only constant was the cast and Mira’s death. 

IT WAS TOO SAD, the Goddess repeated. WE HAVE CHANGED IT. IT WILL BE DIFFERENT, GOING FORWARD.

The Goddess hadn’t answered the exact question Mira meant to ask. Mira had wanted to ask why she’d been spirited away from the Temple, but this was an answer she’d been seeking for thousands of years; the reason for her reincarnations. It wasn’t that she was special. It was just that, for some reason, the Gods had decided she needed to keep her memories from life to life or else her existence was—just too sad? That was understating it. She couldn’t grasp the details of all those past lives the Goddess had shown her, the ones from before she started keeping her memory, but she could remember the relentless, grinding misery of them. Her life as Alanamira stood out like a shining beacon among those memories because it was the one singular life where she was happy right up to the end, even if the end was still sad.

Was that why Adra had been so desperate to preserve her identity and memories of being Alanamira? Because he knew what would be waiting for her if she went back to the Cycle without being changed? 

Had they known one another before she was Alanamira?

If that was true then did it mean that Gods claimed to have pitied her, but they still punished Adra for doing something about her senseless, eternal tragedy?

“Why did you take him away?” Mira asked. The Divine Tongue came more easily to her in her grief and bewilderment, letting her form more complex and emotional queries.

If their purpose had been to make her fate less miserable then how could letting her fall in true, reciprocal love and then taking her lover away, leaving her now immortal spirit to live on all alone, be less cruel?

Again, the Goddess did not answer her in words, but in another memory. 

This time it was from the Goddess’s perspective as she did what Mira could only comprehend, allegorically, as an exhausted pet owner trapping a misbehaving, hysterical animal under a laundry basket while she waited for it to calm down, which it refused to do. In the Goddess’s memory, the animal screamed and thrashed and tried to destroy the basket. It would attack whoever it could reach through the bars. Sometimes, it would fake its own death and then bite whoever came to check on it. Eventually, it ran out of strength and the Goddess was finally able to release it, confident it wouldn’t break anything She couldn’t fix right away, whereupon it immediately vanished somewhere into the ‘house’ and she hadn’t seen or heard from it since. 

‘I can never tell Adra about this,’ Mira thought, as she took in the Goddess’s perspective on Adra’s long imprisonment. If she understood what had happened, it sounded like the Gods didn’t disagree with his idea, just his execution of it and they had replaced whatever he’d tried to do to her soul with something that—that worked better, in their opinion? That bit was a little vague and mostly overwhelmed by the image she’d been shown of Adra as a trashing cat trapped under a hamper.

In fact, she could hardly tell what the Goddess was trying to tell her anymore. Talking to a God always made her head feel like it was fraying at the edges and that she was slowly spinning out into space, while also not moving. She tried to convey her gratitude to the Goddess for even trying to explain, but the Goddess must have felt that their conversation had gone on long enough because her Presence retreated out of Mira’s perception.

That didn’t mean that she was returned to her physical body, though. Not yet.

Instead, she was approached by another figure emerging from the diffuse non-space in front of her; a human one, this time, and it was someone whose face Mira could never forget, no matter how long she lived or how many times.

Melody was a little bit older than Mira remembered her being at the time of her own death. She’d been a lighter-skinned person in that life, whose people had originated from a more northerly climate than Mira’s had. Melody’s homeland had practiced a form of serfdom before the monsters overran the country and she was born into the lowest class of serfdom, the type of chattel who could be sold individually and wasn’t bound to a specific plot of land, and so she had kept the sides of her head shaved as an outward sign of her status until the Temple freed her from bondage. 

Her pale white blonde hair had finally grown all the way out of her slave’s tonsure and had reached her shoulders in a long, tidy bob. You also could see the passage of time in the lines around her mouth and between her brows. She still wore the undyed vestments of a godservant, but the cut was a bit different than Mira remembered her wearing in their shared lifetime. Her skirts were longer and she wore the stole of a High Priestess. 

Her light brown eyes were the same, though, when her wandering gaze found Mira standing before her. She stopped cold and then took a single, hesitant step forward.

“Your Highness?” she asked, with a tremulous hope that confused Mira to her core. If she’d been talking to this same soul as Cecily, or any number of the other lives they’d shared where they’d had an opportunity to become close, then her tone would have made sense. Coming from Melody, however, Mira didn’t understand where these feelings were coming from.

Melody took another step, close enough for them to touch each other, and sank to her knees with every evidence of relief. “You’re alright!” she gasped and reached out to touch the hem of Mira’s gown. What the actual fuck?

“For a given value of ‘alright’,” Mira replied, since it seemed that Melody expected her to say something. “Why are you here?”

“Why am I…” Melody looked up and then the question penetrated whatever fog of emotion she was experiencing. “Why am I here? I–I’m not this person anymore.” She shuddered and her outline rippled, switching briefly back and forth between Melody and Cecily before settling on Cecily’s shape. 

A shiver chased through Mira’s body and she felt her form involuntarily change from Alanamira and back into Violet.

“Mira?” Cecily asked blankly. “How did you get here? Where did the Princess go?”

Mira rubbed her arms, chasing away the phantom pain of that long-gone spellpaint. Even seeing it on her skin for a half second made her feel like there was an itch lingering deep under her skin, far from anywhere she could scratch it without clawing herself down to the bone. Cecily started to reach for her and Mira couldn’t help it, she jerked backwards.

They stared at each other and Mira could see Cecily’s realization even as it hit. 

“It’s you,” she whispered, even as the gauzy nonworld that the Goddess had pulled them into started to dissolve and Mira felt herself being pulled back into her proper, material body. 

Mira landed back in her body with a jolt. It took her a moment to realize where she was and what was going on.

The light that had temporarily blinded her was a little softer now, but the entire Temple was still lit up from within by the pink-tinged light emanating from the altar—no, not from the altar. The light was coming from Cecily.

Mira’s little sister was held aloft in front of the Goddess’s representative by a slow cyclone of sparking divine mana. Her previously short hair had grown out again even longer than it had been in the first game. Her modest pink day suit had been replaced by a billowing white peplos gown with gold and turquoise broaches pinning the shoulders up. The waves of sparkling divine mana slowly lowered her to the ground and coalesced into a long shape in front of her. For a second, Mira thought it was a staff, but when Cecily reached for the object the film of mana obscuring it popped like a bubble to reveal a shining sword. 

It looked a bit like a Spada di Lato sidesword with a golden swept hilt and a crossguard made to look like a set of open wings framing a pink spinel heart. 

The temple priests rose as one and started cheering, “The Saintess has awakened!”

The last thing Mira saw, before Cecily slowly opened her eyes and reached for the floating weapon, was the back side of Adra’s coat as he threw her bodily over his shoulder and fled the temple.