The dawn had come to find a thin sheet of frost over the Hidden Falls, token of the falling temperatures of the nighttime hours. The minuscule crystals still clung to the trees and the grass that had not been burned away except for in the dappled patches of light where the sun's first rays were peeking over the canopy. The light was still strong enough to make quick work of the frost, leaving behind a refreshing dew in it's wake.

Asavvi's breath frosted in the crisp morning air... Or was it Csilla's breath? The girl had been thinking of that much the past few days. The instinctual decision she had mad to give that name at the border was weighing on her for more reasons than she had the heart to examine fully. That her parents not be alerted to her presence here was one consideration but nearly equal to it was she simply hadn't been comfortable with the name, the identity, she had seemed to lose while she had been away from Helovia. The name she had given had been what her captors had called her, and that now was starting to take on it's own sense of being a thorn in her heart. Each day she spent here made her more confident that her thoughts were now her own and slowly the name became more a reminder of that she had fled. The little star-seeker existed now in some strange grey middle-ground between two identities that had been placed upon her; she knew she wanted to shrug them both off but in their place was some gaping unknown and she couldn't bring herself to go either forward or back.

Instead of dwelling on herself, she sought knowledge of others...the Earth God, specifically. Her first exposure to the gargantuan god at the meeting he had called had lit an academic flame that burned just as brightly as her little stars. She didn't know much, she was mature enough to acknowledge that, but the scope of all the things she didn't yet understand was still so unfathomable. The search through history was a tricky way to learn, especially with a specific topic in mind. She had learned quickly that it was restricted to her precise location, and was mostly guesswork unless she knew where a specific even had taken place. Now she looked for the God of Earth, hoping to gain some wisdom he had already imparted; around her the landscape shifted, shimmering from one scene to another as she flicked through the annals of history. 

In a circle about her person plants grew and shrank and shifted, some scenes were blanketed in snow some in Birdsong flowers, there was even one flash of a raging widfire that has raged here long before the previous Tallsun. When she spotted him, the shifting stopped on a bright afternoon, birdsong by the look of it, and from the center of the illusion, Asavvi watch with a restrained sort of anticipation, but the God was only passing. The day her magic recalled had only seen the mighty Earth moving through his realm; he entered on one side of her range and passed out of sigh beyond her boundaries. The vision melted away, leaving only the true, frosty morning and Asavvi heaving a disappointed sigh.

Does the secret fade—

            or is it everlasting?

Asavvi