“How beautiful is it that someone could make your heart beat so fast when you don't want it to beat at all.” ~Unknown
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El tiempo lo cura todo —time heals everything.
Victoria was all too familiar with the phrase in the months and years following her broken engagement. Each time Victoria found herself at the bottom of a bottle, nursing her heartache with alcohol and calling Maria, she’d hear it echoed back at her. But back then, the meaning and lesson behind it escaped her, or maybe she deliberately chose not to understand. Time had only seemed to turn her anger and pain into resentment and spite.
It was funny how she could only see it now, after losing everything that mattered.
She looked up from her journal—its pages filled with haphazard sketches—and cast her gaze down onto the arena floor below from the museum rooftop. She saw the lesson in how diligently the Oseram worked on repairing the arena. Each day brought small but steady progress—a broken pillar restored here, crumbling walls fortified there. Miniscule at a first glance, but so much more once she forced herself to look at it through the wider lense of the world.
She saw the same sentiment among the Tenakth who surrounded her—the way they took the ruins from her time and breathed new life into them as their home. In the way that they embraced each other, despite the differences among the clans, dedicated in their efforts to support their chief in his tireless pursuit of unity.
And beyond the museum—in the world at large—she saw it in how time had healed unimaginable devastation left by an apocalypse she had survived but wished she hadn't. Nature reclaimed what destruction had taken away; greenery sprouted defiantly over scars left by desolation. Work that had taken over a thousand years to repair.
And Victoria recognized it within her own spirit; these small signs of healing.
She didn’t wake up to the raw sting of grief as much anymore, like her heart was slowly learning how to beat again without aching for everything she’d lost. She’d survived, and despite how much she wished she’d hadn’t, Victoria was learning to accept that she had.
Time spent in the company of Ivvira, Dekka or Beta had a new texture to it—laughter and small bits of stolen joy that no longer felt like an enemy and it felt nice to feel happy without feeling the need to punish herself for it.
Then there was Hekarro. His presence filled a void she hadn't realized was so vast until he stepped into it, spaces that she once thought would remain empty forever. And while it didn’t cure her of her loneliness entirely he did help soothe it sharp edges.
“El tiempo lo cura todo, mama.” Victoria muttered under her breath, closing the journal with a snap. “I guess you were right afterall.”
She looked over the distant jungle below. The canopy stretched to the horizon, broken only by the occasional jutting spire of ancient metal. Victoria closed her eyes against the relentless heat and the sweeping breeze that carried the scent of unfamiliar blossoms and damp earth. She let herself get lost in the cacophony of life—the shrill calls of scarlet-winged birds, the chatter of machined hidden in the foliage, and the rhythmic percussion of hammers striking metal and stone as the Oseram worked below.
In the end, she hadn’t planned on eavesdropping, but the acoustics of the museum’s hollowed halls carried conversation like wind through a canyon; what at ground level would be a private argument became, up here, a public performance. The voices were coming from Hekarro’s throne room, and curiosity—and maybe a little dread—drew Victoria's attention as she opened her eyes. She pressed herself flat onto her stomach and inched to the edge of the crumbling parapet behind her, careful not to dislodge any debris.
From her vantage, she could see everything: Hekarro slouched on his throne with the lazy, dangerous grace of an animal at rest, his hands folded in his lap. At his right, Dekka stood at a parade rest, her face impassive but her eyes bright with curiosity, as if she expected this confrontation to become interesting at any moment.
And at the foot of the steps, in sharp contrast to the grandeur above them, waited two Tenakth Victoria had never seen before.
The first was an older woman; she might have been forty or seventy, the way some old soldiers wore hardship like a second skin. Her face was painted with jagged streaks of pink, blue, and white pigment, applied in deliberate Tenakth patterns, and her hair was drawn into a tight bun. She wore a breastplate made of scavenged machine parts, the metal stained and shaped, but arranged with an artist’s precision. Next to her stood a man, broad-shouldered and thick in the neck, with the weathered build of someone who’d spent his entire life trekking the relentless dry steppes. His face was striped with yellow and black warpaint that accentuated the deep creases around his mouth and eyes.
Victoria crept forward another inch. The woman was speaking now, her voice sharp: “The fact remains, Chief Hekarro. Old One or not, Anne Faraday’s blood or not, she takes from the clan but gives nothing in return.”
Victoria felt her cheeks flush, a raw, creeping heat rising from her neck all the way to her brow. She pressed her lips together and tried not to recoil. The old woman’s words stung more than she’d expected. They were ugly, but not untrue. She had been here for months, and what had she done besides drain their stores, sulk around the periphery of their gatherings, and throw the occasional temper tantrum; drifting through the days like a ghost in a place that didn’t believe in ghosts.
Stupid, worthless, useless.
Victoria risked a glance downward. Hekarro was moving, the lazy bonelessness gone from his posture. He straightened, first by degrees, then all at once, coiled like a viper about to strike. He looked down at the two Tenakth. When he spoke, his voice was even, but it carried across the hall with the weight of command.
“She is not an intruder, Chaplain Gerrah,” he said, and the syllables bit into stone. “Nor is she simply a guest who might one day depart. This is her home. Would you have me cast her out into a world she does not recognize? A world that would see her dead within a day, or enslaved by those who use her for the Old Blood she carries? Where is the honor in that?”
The woman—Chaplain Gerrah—snorted. She flicked her fingers in an impatient gesture, as if swatting away a insect. “She does not fight,” Gerrah said simply. “She does not build, or mend, or return any of what we give. She walks our corridors and watches our customs like a child with glass eyes. And you expect us to trust someone who will not risk herself for us, or even for you?”
Hekarro’s head tilted. “She has risked herself,” he said softly. “You simply do not know the shape of it.” For a brief heartbeat, he looked up, straight into the shadows where Victoria hid. His voice softened further. “But she is here now, and she endures. That alone is worthy of respect.”
Victoria felt her breath catch in her throat. She’d never thought of her own existing as ‘enduring.’ She didn’t think anyone else had, either.
The man at Gerrah’s side finally spoke. His voice was low and gravelly, but steady. “She does not bear arms. She does not train. Even the children among us learn to fight, if not for themselves then for the clan. What is her purpose, Chief?”
“That is not for me to decide, Chaplain Jettaka” Hekarro retorted firmly. Chaplain Gerrah only seemed to grow more exasperated.
“So then we are to all bend ourselves to make the Old One comfortable?”
Hekarro’s response was a measured one “If you doubt my judgment, then say it outright, Chaplain. I will hear your argument. But do not presume to speak for the whole of the Clans until you have listened to every voice, including hers. She is not less than you. She is simply different.”
There was a particular cold that came when you realized you were unwanted. Victoria pressed her palms into the crumbling stone, willing herself to stay invisible, to become part of the ruin or else to dissolve into thin air. She should have been used to feeling like an inconvenience by now.
Dekka and the others did their best but there were always those sidelong glances, those moments when conversation died as she approached in some form of fear or awe. No one here knew the full shape of her past, but they didn’t need to. It was written in her blood, obvious in the hollow of her eyes, and in the way she lingered at the edges of fires and feasts, never quite taking part.
She tracked the voices below. Hekarro’s anger was never loud, but it was all the more dangerous for its containment; she recognized the way his fingers clenched in his lap, the precise way he drew each breath as if measuring how much of his patience he could afford to spend. The two chaplains—Gerrah and Jettaka—were relentless, alternating between logic and guilt, a pincer attack meant to force some kind of concession. They wanted her gone. They didn’t say it outright, but the implication was there, thick as machine oil: she was a parasite, draining their resources, clogging the arteries of their society, offering nothing in return but a legacy of destruction she had tried to prevent.
Victoria crawled backwards, scraping her knees on the rough stone. Once out of sight, she scrambled down a heap of rubble and slipped into the underbelly of the museum, moving like a spooked animal through the darkness. The halls were empty at this hour, only the distant echoes of the argument following her as she ducked through half-collapsed doorways and around heaps of ancient debris. She could have gone to Beta’s quarters, or to the communal kitchens, but she didn’t want to see anyone.
Her feet took her to the old wings of the museum. Here, the floors were buckled and the vitrines smashed; sunlight pierced through shattered windows, dust motes swirling in the rays like miniature storms. Victoria perched herself on the edge of a ruined display case and pressed her thumbs into her temples, as if she could rub out the memory of Gerrah’s voice.
She could not. Over and over, the words replayed, like a skipping audio file: She takes from the clan but gives nothing in return. She does not fight. She does not build, or mend, or return any of what we give. She let them burrow into her for a while, let them gnaw on the soft places she usually avoided because they weren’t wrong.
She was a remnant, a ghost story that refused to end. Victoria hunched forward on the edge of the decaying display, fingers interlaced, forehead pressed to her knuckles, squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember when she’d last felt useful. The answer was always the same: Before. Everything was measured against the Before.
She thought of Maria, her mother’s voice rising up through the static of memory, always gentle, always sad at the edges. Growing up, Maria had believed in her fiercely, even when Victoria couldn’t find a single reason to believe in herself. Maria’s faith lingered like the echo of a song she could never quite bring herself to sing aloud.
She wondered, sometimes, what Maria would see if she were here. Would she even recognize the woman Victoria had become? Or would she see only the ruins—the rusted-out promise, the ghost who did not fight or build or mend, only haunted the halls and waited for someone else to give her meaning?
Old and useless. That was what Chaplain Gerrah had really meant, wasn’t it? Not that Victoria was dangerous, but that she was a drain. A mouth to feed. A legacy better left to die out, rather than infect the present with its failures.
God, she thought she was getting better. Not in leaps, but in small increments—tiny, almost invisible gestures of improvement. Learning the culture. Finding a daily rhythm. Laughing, even if the laughter caught in her throat and tasted like regret. Those moments had felt real. Solid.
But now, with the echo of Gerrah’s accusations still rattling in her chest, she wondered if it had all been a lie. If she was just passing time until the inevitable, moving in slow circles around her own obsolescence.
Maybe Maria was wrong after all. Maybe time didn’t heal everything. Maybe some wounds went too deep, past the bone and into the marrow, where nothing could ever put them right again. Maybe she was just…broken.
She fell into the spiral for a while, letting the old fears pull her downward. She was good at that.
At least she was good at something.
And then, like a shadow stretching in behind her, she became aware of Hekarro’s presence. She hadn’t heard him approach—an infuriating habit of his—but suddenly he was at her shoulder, large and quiet and entirely unreadable. For a while, he didn’t say anything; just stood, with his arms folded, looking past Victoria at the empty pedestals and the dust-laden air.
“You should not take stock in the opinions of those who do not understand what you endured, Victoria,” he said, his voice stripped of all the thunder he’d unleashed on the chaplains. Here, with only her to hear, he sounded almost gentle.
She gave him a half-hearted smile, but the effort barely curled her lips. The shape of it was wrong, apologetic, as if she didn’t quite remember how to make the muscles work for their intended purpose. Victoria wiped at the bridge of her nose, hiding behind her hand for a heartbeat, then let it fall away with a sigh.
“Easy for you to say,” she muttered, and though she tried for lightness, the words hung between them, heavy as a dropped stone. “You have a purpose here." Her fingers picked at the hem of her tank, worrying a thread until it threatened to unravel. "You’re the Chief, you know how to be useful. You—" She stopped, embarrassed by the bitterness in her voice, and tried to smooth it out. “I just… I wake up every morning and count off the things I’m not.” Her breath caught. “I watch everyone else move forward, and it’s like I’m stuck on the wrong side of a glass wall."
For a moment, Hekarro just watched her, patient as a statue. Victoria felt the weight of his gaze and the way he stood, perfectly composed. His arms remained folded, the sinew and old scars running like rivers beneath paint and mottled skin. She felt herself flush, the heat of embarrassment climbing her neck, but she did not look away.
Then: “Purpose is rarely obvious, Victoria.”
Victoria expected to see judgment or even impatience etched into his face. But there was only the quiet acceptance, the same calm that always drew her to him. “Then what do I do?” she asked. “Your chaplains are right. I don’t belong here. I—”
Hekarro did not let her spiral further. He unfolded his arms and caught her chin in his hand, as if refusing to let Victoria slip away into the dark corridors of her own mind with eye contact alone. “You are not an interloper, Victoria,” he said, each word shaped with a gravity she could feel in her bone marrow. “Your blood is in the roots of this Grove. Every vine, every stone, every child who learns our customs—your mark is here, woven into the pattern, even if you do not see it. So long as I have a breath left, you will always belong here.”
Victoria closed her eyes. For a long moment, she just sat, letting the silence gather around her the way dust gathered in the corners of the ruined museum. She tried to believe in the certainty that vibrated in Hekarro’s voice, tried to use it like a rope to pull herself out of the pit of voices scrabbling in her head.
“You will find a purpose here, Victoria,” Hekarro said, voice soft but steady. “Whether it falls into your lap or you carve it out piece by piece yourself.”
Victoria opened her eyes and looked at him and found herself caught in the honey-gold color of his gaze, deeper than she remembered, almost animal in its directness. It was like being trapped in amber—warm, but also suffocating in its intimacy.
Her mouth opened, then shut again. She wanted to say something neat and dismissive but the words wouldn’t come. Hekarro waited, unhurried, unblinking, as if he too existed outside the normal flow of time.
“You and I both know it’s not that simple,” she said at last. “I don’t know how to be a part of this. I’m not Tenakth, you know that.”
Hekarro’s lips curled into a bemused smirk, “You think the rest of us have it any easier? Tenakth grow up fighting for every scrap of identity, every inch of ground. Half of us don’t even know who we are until we bleed for it.” He tipped his head. “You are more Tenakth than you think. Hard to kill, harder to change.”
Victoria huffed out a breath, something halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “I wish I could believe that mattered.” She dropped her gaze, tracing the cracks in the floor with her eyes. “Maybe I'm learning to accept that I survived but it doesn't change the fact that I'm… some relic that should have been forgotten.”
He held on a moment longer than necessary, then let go with obvious reluctance. “You call yourself a relic,” he said, “but relics are what teach us who we were. What we might still become. Even if your purpose is nothing more than walking the Grove with me, telling me stories of your time, that is enough.”
Victoria blinked, unsure how to respond, feeling both mollified and slightly ridiculous. She tried to conjure up a joke—Maybe she'll start charging admission—but the words died in her throat, replaced by something like gratitude, sharp and unfamiliar.
Hekarro touched her shoulder with a gentleness that he only ever reserved for her. “Come,” he said, nodding toward the corridor where golden dust motes danced in the light. “Walk with me, if you’d like. You could tell me another story of the Old World.”
And maybe she really didn’t have a purpose, not the kind the chaplains wanted, not the sort that could be measured in bushels harvested or enemies slain. Maybe Maria was both right and wrong, as mothers tend to be. Maybe she’d always be too brittle, too much of a fossil, an artifact left over from someone else’s story.
But Hekarro’s words stuck, clinging to her bones like the dust to the displays.
You are not an interloper. Relics teach us what we might become.
The words didn’t erase the ache, but they pressed against it, softened its edge. She glanced up at him, saw the faintest trace of amusement in the lines at the corners of his eyes, the gentler version of the warlord now so familiar in these empty hours. And she hopped down from the broken display case, boots crunching through the glass of a thousand lost curiosities, and landed beside him and followed his even gait.
She didn’t know if this counted as being useful, but for the moment, it felt as close as she would ever get.
