[Elythia]
[Eternal City]
The streets of the city stretched before Aelfric, the other Ancestors moved with their own goals, their robes sweeping against the stone, their conversations hushed yet filled with their own meaning.
Aelfric walked among them, his black robes trailing behind him, but he felt separate. Distant. His thoughts churned, his conversation with Lyra lingering like a shadow in his mind.
Death.
He had spoken the word aloud. Admitted it.
He was afraid.
The admission still unsettled him. He, who had spent so long pursuing knowledge, who had gazed into the fabric of existence and dismantled it piece by piece, now found himself standing before a barrier he could not cross. Death was not a concept he could unravel. It was an end he could not calculate.
How does one approach Death? Speak to it? Bargain with it? Was it even possible?
