By the end of the second year she had remastered basic arithmetic, logic and the foundational algebra that served as the basis for thaumaturgy.Simple language, too, though she often found herself floundering for want of a word, its absence felt as a lacuna in her thoughts.
It was not unusual, Arno explained, while he sat with her at a table in the learning crèche for one of their weekly check-ins.There were often holes in memory, at first.Death was traumatic, and rebirth equally so.All would return to her, he reassured, in time.
And he was right, in part.The words returned to her by the third year.Much of her memory did not.
Everything before she left the City was clear enough, only shrouded by an expected fog, the same occlusion that steals the clarity from all our memories over time.She remembered all eight rejections from the research board with a searing, white-hot clarity.But after her departure there were holes, and more of them the more recent the memories.It was as though her life were a story being told by an increasingly drunk and lazy bard—details omitted, characters forgotten, plot lines dropped as the teller became less focused on the tale and more on finding his bed for the night, and perhaps a friend to warm it.
There were strong images, stripped of context.Great towers of bone, pulsing with sickening, twisted power.An aleph, like the one in the courtyard near the crèche, but in a courtyard readied for war.A pale, dark-haired girl, smiling and singing on a stage, or kneeling on a rooftop, and in either case evoking a deep fascination and profound sorrow.But another image of folk gathered around her, full of warmth that cut against her sadness.
Most frequent was a towering, four-armed figure who stirred that same flutter that had burned through Fola continually in her third year of regrowth—a year lost almost entirely to a firestorm of emotion and physical change while her body sprinted through puberty.
In the fourth year, Arno finally conceded that something might have gone wrong.
‘Memory is a fragile thing,’ he explained, folding his long- fingered hands beneath his chin.He had a white, curling beard now, which she did not remember from before her death.‘Even those who never experience death and rebirth lose parts of themselves to the mind’s slow, inevitable decay.And as individuals forget, so cities, nations, and peoples forget.That’s why we write so many things down!It’s part of the motto, even—“The archive guards against forgetting”.’
They were sitting at their usual table in the crèche.One set off to the side of the courtyard, shrouded by gossamer webs that dampened sound between the trees for the sake of privacy.Light filtered from a lattice of glass filigree and twining vines overhead.Frog—her stalwart friend, her saviour—peered down at them from his perch among the branches, slowly blinking his wide, thoughtful eyes.
Nearby, at another such table, a few children sat with a teacher, spell-slates and thaumaturgist’s pens in their laps.The quiet murmur of their lessons was punctuated by sharp peals of laughter and sudden bursts of magical light.Cold fireworks, one of the first lessons taught to every child who chose to study magic.Fola re-membered learning the simple spell, and growing frustrated with its simplicity, tinkering with the design on her own while the teacher was inattentive.As clear a recollection of her first, true childhood as she could muster.An early experiment that had ended in some burnt eyebrows and singed noses, a sharp telling-off, and muffled laughter behind her back for the next month.
She was sure there were other moments that had built up her reputation, each one isolating her from her peers, each a stone laid on the pathway that had led to rejection, frustration and—eventually—her death.This one moment, though, was bright in memory, while the others were silhouettes in fog.
She said all of this to Arno, and then, ‘It’s different, though, because I still have the silhouettes, at least.The memories I’m missing from my time in the wider world are lost entirely.Holes, not shadows.And there are random spots of light.Things I remember clearly, but they’re like islands in a sea of… well… nothing.Like stars.Otherwise, I’m almost entirely back to my old self.In a couple more years, I’ll be fully caught up to my preferred physical age, even.’
He smiled at that.‘Thirty-two.Clearly no longer a child, but still youthful.I wondered if you would finally let yourself finish growing up, after death.’
‘Maybe I would if I could remember how I died,’ she snapped.‘You’d think that would stick in memory, at least.’
It had something to do with the girl, she felt.She had no real knowledge of this, no image or conversation she could recall, but the feeling persisted.
‘Four years is a long time to be away, Fola,’ Arno said sadly.‘Generally, field work ought not to go longer than two years at a stretch.The birds of the Great Tree are powerful, but memories are complex, and carrying them for another soul more complex still.It remains a wondrous mystery how the birds do it at all.This is not the first time an overlong stay in the wider world, and a resulting death, has caused problems—though in that prior case, the length of time away was several decades, and the result much… stranger, shall we say.’
‘So I’ll never get them back?’Fola asked.A notion that she knew, intellectually, would have terrified herself before her death.Yet it did not really trouble her, now.There was a sense of loss, but also a sense of relief.How had those holes in her story changed who she was?Who she might become?
Some version of her endured, but not the same version that had existed before.
But really, wasn’t that always true, of everyone?Lives took turnings.People changed—sometimes in ways that person might not have chosen beforehand.What child can imagine, and plan for, all the contortions of a life?
She made these observations to Arno, who laughed aloud.
‘I would make a joke about you being wise beyond your years,’ he said.‘But that would be gauche.Wiser, I think, than you were before your time away.Perhaps some of what you learned persists, though you cannot remember the details of how you learned it.’
‘I guess this all means I’ll get to decide who I want to be,’ she mused.A liberating feeling.One that might have clashed with the previous Fola, who had died.But… she had died.And now she was someone else.
‘To a certain extent,’ Arno observed.‘It may take time for some folk to forget biases towards who youare, born of who youwere.’Another moment of hesitation, then his posture and tone became suddenly aloof, handling her at a careful distance.‘If there were a way to go back to yourself, to restore who you were, with all that entails—the same goals, hopes and dreams, and the same history—would you take it?Or would you prefer this blank slate that Frog’s… I want to say “failure” provides, but I can see now that you do not like that phrasing.’
‘He did his best, Arno.’Fola felt a strange heaviness, a thundering in her ears.A nervous apprehension.
Images arose behind her eyes.The four-armed man.The sad, singing girl.
‘Is there a way?’she asked carefully.‘Not that I would take it, necessarily.’
Did she owe it to that past self, the one who had died believing she would be reborn?She was unsure.It was a terribly uncomfortable feeling.
Arno smiled gently, seeming to observe the tension in her.He was very good at that—very attentive and careful.A good teacher.She hoped the past Fola had thought so, too.
‘There may be,’ Arno said.‘Who can say, in a world like ours.Perhaps the First Folk could have managed it.I have only theories, which I will not burden you with now.Otherwise, how goes your adjustment?’
Their conversation changed course into less fraught waters.Yes, she was making friends—mostly with new people whom she had met through her time in the crèche.One was a poet who had lived three hundred years, but who felt his work had grown stale and had decided to experience ageing and death in hopes of a creative rejuvenation.Thus far to little result, but he was holding out hope.A few others were parents of young children being educated in the crèche.None were old acquaintances of the past Fola.In fact, of all the people she could recall from before her departure, only Arno had come to visit in the last four years.
