imitator imperator

Birth was so long ago.

Eighty-eight years, she'd lived, before the direct calamity that was the remade world. For a High Entia, they say, that is not so long. For any living creature, of course it is a mortal eternity.

Classically, the span of time is compressed when you are a child. All is relative, and every new experience is a paradigm shift in context and in proportion.

So Melia had liked, well enough, the process of growing up, of maturing. With Kallian as her reflection, her mentor and her measuring stick, childhood had been an appreciable thing. She let her hair grow out, out, out, and curled it up all bounces and frills.

Long hair does not befit either an infant or an aged soul, you see. And Melia was always prepared for her eventualities.

She was ready to become princess, to hide behind the mask of empress when the time came, only because she must have been. Only because it was dictated.

She's still ready. She's still hiding. She still doesn't want it.

Two truths, one lie. That's a game you never play in earnest in true childhood.

How mature could she truly have been? The standard - yes, all things relative - is that she was only barely teenage. Her shoulders, capped by cavernous crescents, were not nearly broad or stout enough to handle the weight of all her responsibilities.

She knows that. She knew that. She's still not used to it, at her core, all the same.

And how long has it been now? Another eight times as long?

No. It couldn't be. That would be, quite literally, time immemorial. And Melia remembers long before that.

She remembers the bright, hopeful faces of all the Homs who'd been unbothered by her tampered legacy. She remembers the loyalty and uprightness of every beautiful unturned citizen of Alcamoth. She remembers Teelan and Tyrea as youthful, hopeful creatures, instead of the grim retainers that surround her now.

She remembers, unthinkable as it may be, what it was like to truly be young, to feel it and not just seem it.

She remembers what it was like to let her hair down and truly feel free.

Fiora had done that, of course. Fiora had given Melia hope to see through dire situations. She'd shown that crucial example, that you can bear witness to utter atrocities levied against your loved ones, by their own folly or by that of other men, and that you can keep going because you've got the chance.

That chance is everything. On the other side of the coin from responsibility, of course, lies opportunity. And Fiora's bright, beautiful face was always searching for the latter, skirting the former, and crying out with joy in her life-supported heart at the rest.

"Aren't you so glad to be alive, Melia?!" she had exclaimed, stood on the beach in the new, restored Colony 9 with arms spread wide to the sky and sandals stomping indelible footprints in the crudgy mix of earth and sea. "Look at us, we made it - both of us!"

Both of us. Such duality, there is, in a half-and-half here and a half-and-half there. The terrible assassin Nia is much the same, of course. And what had she lost, in her time?

Surely she had not lost an entire race of brethren. Surely she had not come alongside a woman who'd died by a machine's claws and then been turned into one, against her will. Surely her suffering is not equal to that of the fallen High Entia.

Melia doesn't know. For all the wisdom and worldliness she is supposed to have, given her age and stature, she is as yet unsure of what lurks on the other side. She only knows what has come willingly into her orbit.

The number of people who'd been unafraid of her was quite few. It wasn't just because Fiora and her family were stupid.

Aren't I so glad? Yes, indeed, I am. Because I know that you, Fiora, even if installed as empress, would never become so fossilized as I have. Did you see the Telethia in Agniratha? I, somehow, after it all, am still so much like them.

If you like, you can say that she'd been buried alive in the Machina frame, heart beating without her willing it. But, more likely, Fiora had never truly died. Only now was Melia letting the spirit of her hope disappear completely.

Fiora's regenerated body had failed, soon enough. By some standards, anyway. Before Melia's age had quite doubled, the Homs girl, after turning into a woman herself, was gone.

It was then that Melia found just how much of herself she had been burying in the soul of the other girl. Just how much life she trusted to miracles and faith.

There had always been a reason Melia was kept from turning Telethia. There had always been a purpose, a motive and a choice.

She cannot abandon those things now. Her face is her mask. Her rule is not her own opportunity.

Oh, lies you tell, lies you tell, lies you tell. People loved you - Fiora loved you, Melia! And now you are nothing but a manipulative figurehead.

An ouroboros consumes itself, the never-ending constant cycle of life and death.

The tail is always bitten. The head never dies.