Elowen

In Olumre, people do not bury the dead; they plant them. Elowen was six years old. It was the quick spring of 1190 AS. AS means After Stillness; it is how Devran counts its years. Her mother laid her among the roots of the Mother Tree, but did not plant her. Because Elowen had not died. She had been Stilled. The Stillness is the motionlessness that comes when Dem stops flowing; it is not death.

That year the plague spilled from the Pale Belt into the villages. This sickness does not begin with fever; it begins with silence. First a child freezes mid-game for a moment. Then the child freezes a little longer. In the end, the child does not move at all. Elowen had reached out to catch a butterfly. At that very moment, she stopped. Her hand stayed outstretched for thirty years.

The Root Circle carried her beneath the Mother Tree. The Stilled children lay there in rows. Every season, their families left flowers beside them. In Olumre, seasons pass in weeks. Hundreds of springs and hundreds of rots fell upon Elowen. Her mother grew old, died, and was planted. Her brother married, and his children grew up. Elowen stayed still.

One morning in 1220 AS, her hand finally reached the butterfly. But the butterfly was gone. In its place was a stranger's wrinkled face. The woman was her niece, and she was forty. The elders of the Root Circle called it a miracle. That night the Mother Tree had bloomed out of season. Pink petals had rained from its branches. The elders said the tree had woken her. Elowen believed it. She wanted to believe it.

Because she had no other explanation. After she woke, flowers began to bloom wherever she stepped. The healers called it a blessing. But in time Elowen noticed something else. The flowers were not blooming from her own Dem. Dem is time in solid form in Devran. The flowers bloomed from a surplus of Dem inside her. Inside her was an overflowing time that did not belong to her. But whose time was it? Since then she wears boots. She pours the time that is not hers onto the soil only to close a wound.

In those years, none of the other children beneath the Mother Tree woke. From her thirty Stilled years, she kept only one voice. A child with a cracked voice sat beside her every day and hummed the same lullaby. When Elowen woke, she searched for the owner of that voice. No one remembered. They only said that an apprentice had stopped coming to the Mother Tree that summer. They knew nothing more.

Today Elowen is the youngest healer of the Root Circle. She is sixty-three by the calendar and thirty-three in body. She plants gardens on the edge of the Pale Belt. She sows seeds around the Stilled children. She waters the seeds with Dem-sap. Some of the children twitch, but none of them wake. Elowen sees something else too. Every day, the Stilled of the Belt turn a little further in the same direction. They all turn toward Kadrun, where the Arena stands.

Some nights she tries to sleep in her niece's house, in her childhood bed. The bed is not too small for her. What feels too small is the room full of strangers. Her niece's grandchildren call her auntie, then fall silent, unsure. In Olumre, the dead are planted. But there is no rite for those who come back. Elowen made up that rite herself. Every morning she leaves a seed where her mother was planted.

That is why she came to the Arena. The Arena's Dem is far more than any single flower could give. But the Arena takes a price from her for every wound she heals. A champion who dies in the Arena is rewound and returns. The price of every Rewind is a moment erased from memory. In the last Swing, her last match, she could not remember her mother's voice. Elowen sees a strange justice in it. Perhaps time is always taken back from somewhere.

Every time she meets Ravel, they fight. Ravel heals with rot, Elowen with flowers. Ravel burns villages, Elowen builds them. After Greenmere, Olumre voted to exile Ravel. In that vote, Elowen's hand was the first one raised. Then came the night of the Skip. The Skip is the moment the whole world stopped for a single heartbeat. That night Elowen felt the surplus time inside her stir. It seemed to recognize its owner. It turned toward the beak-masked man at the far end of the Arena.