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A big and barren throne room, abandoned from all life and silent save for Ciri’s footsteps echoing through the once proud building.
The silence is not suffocating, rather more like the waiting after one big exhale, caught forever in that moment. All the crumbling buildings beyond her gaze, caught in their ruin, resigned in their devastation. No falling stone and shifting rubble, no clouds on the horizon, no wind to pick up the dust of generations.
She doesn’t know how long this world has been on the verge of the next inhale, waiting and lingering for something that might never and forever come inevitably.
Walking through the forgotten halls of a lost civilization who has left nothing but their craftsmanship behind. No story as grand as the towering blocks of stone and carved faces of their once beloved. The fabrics unwoven in eternity, by time untouched and only ruined by their own sculpted makings.
Ciri kicks a stone, making it skip and hop on the broken floors, watching it for it does not make a sound. Does it make no sound because she does not belong here and this world sees her not, is blind to her, or is it caught in the silence and time standing still? She continues to walk and from the corner of her eyes she watches as the stone skips back into place.
As she climbs the steps and lets her hand drift over the railing and the statue at the top she hears behind her a sound foreign to this world, familiar to her.
She greets her friend, her mentor with a nod. “Avallac’h.”
“Zireael.” He steps up beside her and lets his gaze wander over this world stranded in oblivion. “A curious world you have selected for a stroll of contemplation.”
She shakes her head and hops to sit on the statue's ledge, kicking her legs into the air. “Nothing as conscious as choosing. I’ve let my feelings take me on the journey and landed here.”
Avallac’h hums noncommittally and steps up to the walls, assessing the carvings that speak of this place’s extinct history. “Strange feelings and thoughts that must have led you here.”
Ciri laughs loudly, it doesn’t ring inside the building, no echo of her presence. “I was just thinking about time and my place in it.”
“Ah I see. Your place in time or your time in different places?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Of course, it all comes down to one's perspective.”
He turns his back to the manifesto of excellence and observes Ciri, stark against the unmoving and moving upon the place of static. She tilts her head and watches him, waiting, attentive and not knowing she knows the answer, has known it, will know it.
“You have shaped lives long before you were ever born and have long since influenced events that would lead to your eventual birth, if you knew about it or not. You are always there, were always there, and you will always be born to be there. Even if you are gone, you are still here, always somewhere in place and time, in the past, in the present, in the future. There is always only you of course, for yourself that is but time distorts it- sometimes you are two at two different places at the same time and other people might see two of you even if for you there is only yourself. You are one but many, young and old, a fixed wheel inside time.”
“You speak in riddles, Avallac'h.”
“If you now travelled to your childhood, would you say that the Cirilla of that time is another you or is she just you, but younger, caught in the past set to become you?”
“Ah. I am me, of course. The Ciri of that time is me, my younger self, as I am the younger self for any older me that would, could, will run by past me.”
“Yes, you’ve left your marks across time, across your world and others and you will leave them, influencing places and events in a circle without knowing it.”
“Are there any choices then that I make out of my own free will? If I have always been and will always be, I need to and take the steps for the shaping, always. Which decisions come from me and which from Destiny?”
“All of your decisions are yours, all of them have been done by you past or present or future, just because you don’t know the choices you will make doesn’t mean they aren’t irrevocably yours.”
“The only thing this is, is being incredibly confusing.”
“You were the one who seemed to want to know, time is certainly confusing but also so very, very interesting. Is it linear or circular? Who truly knows the answer to that, certainly not us mortals and for we are mortal because as long as we might live, we are still flesh and bone and weak in the face of the ultimate end.”
“You don’t think we are supposed to be able to understand time?”
“No, neither are we supposed to understand the universe, the veil, the death, the nothingness. For if we understand any of those things it will come at a loss of what makes us how we are, a death but not, a rebirth into something higher.”
“I don’t think I would like to lose myself for more understanding.”
“Then you are one of few, I’ve seen many beings destroy themself in parts or in entirety for more knowledge and apparent wisdom. Knowledge might be power and the key for greatness but who will benefit if the one with it is gone and lost, a husk of their former self.”
“Yes. You’re right and it’s a sad and depressing truth that there will always be people like this, as there always has been.”
“Now, we both have places to be Zireael, being able to arrive on time however long you choose to remind doesn’t change it. I do recommend to not lose yourself in the unmoving, there are better things to do with your time than contemplate time and it’s inevitability.”
With this said, Avallac’h nods at her and opens a crackling portal to disappear inside. Leaving no trace of ever having been there. The footsteps inside the dust long since settled back to their forever state of tranquility.
Ciri jumps down from her perch and with one last gaze across the vastness of tragedy, she too departs this wasteland. A flash of light, the last thing seen by the blind world as their visitors leave, never to return.
Knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss.
Last light faded, Ciri is ignorant how the world she left starts to breathe, a long inhale, the groaning and cracking of a building crumbling to dust a prelude to new history.