text: Llau watches him quietly at her mother’s bedside, still clasping her wrinkled, withered hand in both of his own, his head bowed in a facsimile of prayer. Like a statue he stayed motionless, even after the rest of the mourners had run out of tears to give and goodbyes to leave behind. He sat there, unmoving, even as the sun dipped down below the mountains and the moon rose to shine solemnly above them both. Llau’s own sorrow still lingers, her tear tracks not yet dry, but she engulfs the emotion in her heart as she wanders unsteadily towards them, on legs too weak to fully support her. Her mother had never gotten the chance to see her walk in the end. She had always grown slower than the other children. While her nursery mates began to totter unsteadily on their feet she had still rolled happily on the ground, her uncoordinated limbs getting trapped in the underwrappings. While they began shooting up in height, beginning to run and play she had crawled complacently after them, her body still round and soft while theirs began to sharpen, their muscles growing strong with action. Now they tower over her, comfortable in bodies which have reached adulthood while she still stagnates in the thralls of childhood. She reaches her parents finally and tugs gently on her father’s sleeve. Her mother she glances at only peripherally, almost too scared to look closely at that gentle, peaceful face, in case she fools herself that her mother only sleeps, that she will wake up to smile and kiss her cheeks lovingly once more. But she looks anyway in the end, to imprint her elderly visage in her mind, because even then she realises that she must keep her mother’s memory safe, from time and the failings of her own mind. Her father eventually stirs at her third tug. He releases her mother’s hand reluctantly, arranging it beside her body almost in a quiet trance. He turns to Llau belatedly, his face frozen still in grief even as he tousles her hair with gentle, wrinkled hands. He looks back at her mother once again, before finally closing his eyes to turn away and stand. She had known her father as an old man first. Now he shifts, slowly and gradually. His bent back seems to straighten like a flower rising up to meet the sun. His grey, thinned hair turns black and abundant, his wrinkles ironing out of his skin and all the age spots which Llau had known like landmarks disappearing into nothing. Finally his body stands before her, young in a way she had never known. The stranger kneels before her in a way her father would never have been able to accomplish with his stiff, rickety knees. He opens his arms invitingly and speaks in a voice that sounds different, erased of all the hoarseness of age. “Let us go, Llau.” She hesitates. The stranger simply watches her with all the patience of something ancient. It is a strange sight, to see familiar eyes exactly as she had known them for all her life but transplanted into a unfamiliar young visage. Later on she will return to this town, the site of her mother’s grave. She will see it changed by the toll of decades, see her mother’s legacy grown and spread into half-legend. She will see her old nursery mates old and withered, yet content with their own grandchildren and great-grandchildren while she still lingers in young adulthood. She will weep in the knowledge that her passage of time lies separate to all others, a knowledge that she will never be able to reconcile. But now she wipes her tears away with the clumsy hands of a toddler, before stepping hesitantly forward into her father’s embrace. Now she simply lays her head down on her father’s shoulder, sniffling as he patiently wipes the last of her tears and snot away with a sleeve as they finally leave the healing wards, to disappear quietly into the night.