There is something in the air here, a strangeness, foreign, dark and dreary- yet sometimes glittering of déjà vu, like dust motes in a sunbeam. Memories. Dreams. Ghosts. Try to touch them and they may as well not exist, yet they lay upon her skin like kisses, each one a loving blow from the ten-ton weight of history. She has returned home, but it is a home belonging to a different her, a younger her- and she wonders if this her could possibly find a place here, in a world where she so clearly does not belong.

She swallows, for she fears this may be true. Perhaps the World’s Edge is too changed, too thoroughly scrubbed clean of its sordid past, for any memory of the girl to remain. But if she cannot find herself here, in this place, then where?

She hesitates, halfway between the glass wall (something else I do not know) and escape. She has been lost for so long. Does she really think the Edge will remember her? That she will remember it?
I’m afraid, she confides to the fox who rests astride her back; and the kitsune rubs against her, his presence a warmth in her troubled mind. So am I, he tells her. But if not now, when?

Tightness rises in her throat, and something else, too. In the moonlight her body moves, a careful stride followed by one more, and one again. If not now, when? She repeats his words like a mantra, lets them fill her blood and fuel her bones. If not now, when? Her hooves move faster, sinew pulling harder. If not now, when?

I am finally going home.

On the trail of the wall of glass, the Fire Dancer runs. The girl stands out brightly against the eerie, muted tones of her surroundings. Wreathed in flickering embers and glowing stones, copper child is a bolt of fire, a copper wraith in a silver sea. It is apparent to anyone who looks that she does not possibly belong in these woods - and yet she does, for upon her face is the Moon’s crescent mark, obscured as it may be by the tangle of braids which hangs from her crown. She runs, and the light runs with her; she runs until her sides are heaving, her mind is racing, dopamine and adrenaline spurring on her steps. She runs until she reaches the gap in the glass, nearly passes it, nearly passes it, and then-

-and then she is through, and there is nowhere to go but forward.

Talk talk talk.