Running out of air

Some things have changed dramatically. The Spire is a teetering skeleton of its former eerie majesty, a crumbling monolithic monument to their countless past mistakes, a last and lingering representation of all they were before. Sometimes Amalia looks up at it as she walks from Deimos' house before dawn, shivering at its mockery of all she used to know. Once, it says, The world was small, and though you could have understood it, you chose instead to hid. Now the world is bigger than you ever imagined possible, and you will never understand. She tries not to look very often. She tries to keep her eyes on the stars, her thoughts on the future, her hopes on the horizon. She tries to make sure each step is a step forward, toward a tomorrow that at last makes sense. Long Night is coming, and the days are growing short. They need to find answers before the darkness takes them. They need to find a cure. Sighing, Amalia shakes her head, pushing open the bakery door and stepping inside, Jyoti lighting the way. Some things are the same as they have always been. She has always found solace in work, comfort in purpose, whatever it may be. Sometimes those purposes are lofty ambitions: finding tomes and saving souls, slaying darkness and building shrines. Usually, though, her work is simple. Flour and water and yeast and salt, mixed by the magic of nature, by slender fingers and wooden spoons. Amalia has always found something beautiful in baking, mystified and magnetized by it as a youth. She would watch, enraptured, as her grandmother created loaves of bread, crafting something warm and wholesome from ingredients tasteless on their own. If only it were as easy to make sense of life as it is to fold a loaf of bread. Amalia is kneading when the front door opens, a wafting rush of cold air pulling at her golden locks. The chill of it is nothing compared to the feeling inspired by the voice, both familiar and distant, one she knows as well as any and one she has not heard in some time. Freezing, she does not look up from her work, though her arms are rigid and her fingers tense, statuesque and poised as she thinks through the days, the weeks, since she saw him last. The basement, the Cloister, the spire, the blight. Swallowing, the baker raises black eyes, her expressive face uncharacteristically still. "Hello, Jigano. What can I do for you today?" a m a l i a You were young and you'd stare With a reverence unimpaired Searching in your dark eyes to find the stars already there