Eluvie walked aimlessly down a nonexistent path leading uphill. She did not know how much time had passed but had long ceased to seek out memories. They found her; triggered by flying over a distinctive building, staring in a certain action, or simply remembering a certain person. All of the ones since the tunnel had been mundane - even the ones she triggered in her residence. And since flying had proven no less dangerous than walking, she had decided to exert her legs.

  There was an empty stretch of land before her - free of trees, boulders, or buildings. It seemed like a safe place to rest, so she sat down.

  And, of course, triggered another memory.

  It was night again. Above her, the sky was starless as it always was in Sanctuary. All of the daytime animals had gone to sleep, while the nighttime ones - the insects at least - were fully awake. She sat on the grass, listening to the sounds and writing down the ones that she could identify.

  "Why are you here?" a voice asked.

  She jumped to her feet, momentarily terrified, then scowled and scolded herself. She was not breaking any rules. For a moment, she could not find the speaker. Then, she noticed that a tall patch of grass to her left had a man-shaped hole in it. The man wore plain black clothing that blended into the darkness.

  "Do you have the standing to ask me that?" she asked. "Aren't you unranked?"

  "You have ten seconds to explain why you are violating curfew," he said flatly, "before I throw you across the town and into the arms of those incompetent guards."

  Eluvie prepared to scold him again, but she checked herself. Unranked Illrum were rarely so confident. Perhaps he was simply in the wrong clothing. If she offended someone high-ranking, her nighttime trips could come to an end.

  She schooled her voice into a respectful tone. "I have permission," she said. "For research."

  "Research somewhere else," he said tonelessly.

  Eluvie did not move. "Unfortunately, my permission for today restricts me to this location."

  "Then leave, and try again another day."

  Eluvie returned to scowling. "Why? Do you own this hill?"

  He laughed hysterically. "Coincidentally, I do."

  A suspicion crept into Eluvie's mind, drawn by his odd laugh, his posture, and his nonsensical words.

  "Are you drunk?" she asked.

  "Eh, it's possible. This body has a low tolerance."

  "That is against the rules," she said sternly.

  "Child, this is your last warning. Stop bothering me or I won't apologize."

  Eluvie bristled at the insult. She was more than two centuries old and had passed two trials. She wasn't a child by any objective measure. Still, she schooled her temper and considered the matter for a while. Only one of her friends had ever drunk to excess, and she knew that the problem hid more than a rule-breaking inclination.

  "Do you need help?" she asked finally.

  "What?" he mumbled.

  "If I tell one of the others, I'm sure they won't punish you. If you're struggling with something then -"

  "What a busybody," he muttered.

  His body tensed, as if he was about to do something to her, so she spoke quickly.

  "I won't tell anyone as long as you let me help. But if you won't accept my help, then I have to tell someone. You're breaking curfew, drinking, and clearly miserable. It would be cruel of me to ignore this. I don't want to be a nuisance. So, you have my word that nothing you tell me will reach another ear. You only have to tell me how to help and I will do it."

  He sat up and fixed Eluvie with a glare. "How old are you?"

  "Two hundred and nine."

  "And how many trials have you passed?"

  Eluvie squirmed under his disdainful tone. "Two."

  "Let me see if I remember this," he said. "That means that you've passed the Test of Obedience and the Test of Virtue. It's no wonder that you remember all the rules I'm violating. Unfortunately, to properly counsel me or even understand a word of my problems, you need…" he counted on his fingers, "six more trials. So, run on home. When you're a Rauw, return and I'll tell you how you can help me."

  Eluvie frowned. "Are you a Rauw? I thought that there was no one that high."

  He rose to his feet with a frustrated sigh and a drunken wobble. "Never mind. I'll just leave."

  "I'll find you," Eluvie said.

  He froze in his steps. "My mentor is Zaniba. If I ask him to, he'll call an assembly so that I can search every person in the community. I'm sorry to be so much trouble, but you need help even if you can't see it."

  He muttered again. She could not hear his words this time, but the irritation in his tone was clear.

  He began tapping his foot rapidly, as if searching for a response.

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  "I'm sorry," Eluvie said. "It is rude to threaten others, but I can't leave you in this state. Perhaps I can't understand your problems, but there must be something that I can do. I know that if I were in your situation, I would want help."

  He turned back to face her, a full sneer on his face. "Fine," he said. "You want to help? Let's see if you can afford to. Since you've managed to reach Eram, I know that your virtue is not in question. So, I'm certain that you will not repeat anything I say to anyone."

  He walked toward her until there was barely a foot of space between them.

  "You see," he said, "I have a problem. I can hear," he gestured around them, "to this place with two hundred million seeds, two hundred million Illrum. The very last Illrum that my Lord gave me. His only remaining children. Understand this: there are no more. He almost died saving these last few. Till this day, I do not know if he will ever wake again. But I thought, if I protect these few, someday he will wake and I will say, look at the people you saved with your life. Look at the people you sacrificed everything for. I've protected them. I've taught them. All that you lost was not in vain."

  He was staring at her with a gaze so intense that she thought she would melt.

  "But do you know what happened?" He asked.

  Eluvie instinctively shook her head.

  "It's not the fact that they keep failing trials." He waved a hand as if to brush that off. "That is to be expected. They can't all be perfect. No, it's not that. You, how old did you say you are? Two hundred? And you've completed how many trials? Two?"

  He laughed hysterically. He laughed for so long that she thought he had gone completely mad.

  "You don't see why that's funny do you? Hey! Idiot! In my day, you took one trial per decade, every decade that you were able. Two trials in two centuries?! Of course, you all keep failing. Waiting longer between trials does not give you time to prepare. It gives you time to degrade, to become stupid and lazy, to get used to this nightmare, thinking that it is all you need."

  His breathing was heavy and the rage radiating from him forced Eluvie to back away.

  "And here is the most hilarious part. When you people reach the third rank, you just stop. Congratulations! You're done!"

  His voice fell back to a reasonable volume and his tone grew cold.

  "So, when my Lord wakes, if he ever wakes, I will get to tell him: of the people you left me, some failed, became mortal and died. Some proved themselves to be cowards, stopping at the third rank, content to die as their bodies age. And the rest stopped somewhere before the tenth rank, never achieving true immortality. By the time he wakes, you will all be long dead and I will say, 'I'm sorry. I lost them all. I'm sorry. All those you sacrificed the love of your life to save. None of them are left.'"

  Eluvie’s mind stumbled as she tried to find a response. "We are immortal," she said. "We won't die."

  He glared at her. "You think that immortality is granted to fools and cowards? Those who stop at the third rank, too fearful to test their courage, can they be trusted at any task? Zaniba, who has led the entire community into this life of cowardice? Should he be rewarded for it? When true evil, our enemies who forced us into this corner return? Is it those weaklings who will stand against them? Or will they join them, searching for the easiest and safest path as they have done for centuries?"

  Eluvie was not certain that she understood his entire rant, but she understood enough.

  "Why didn't you tell us this?" she screamed! "My friends died! No one knows -"

  "What do you think a trial is?! Do you believe that you can be brave only when I tell you to be brave? Be virtuous only when I ask you to be? Do you think our enemies send announcers before their arrival saying, 'now is the time to dust off your intelligence, we attack at dawn?!' This whole place is a trial, you moron! All of it! It's a trial to see: when our Lord is absent, when he no longer tells you what to do and where to go and who to be, can you be anything? You are always, always, in a trial. That is why those fools like your mentor who believe that they can simply stop progressing, that is why they are so wrong. Because they have already failed and they do not know it."

  He covered his face with his hands.

  "And I am so tired," he sobbed. "I didn't think that I would have to hold on this long." He laughed miserably. "I did not imagine that you would all be so stupid. So, child who wants to solve my problems, this is your warning. I am giving you all until the last seed sprouts. When that last Illrum reaches a hundred, if nothing has changed, I will stop fighting. This land you're standing on, the sky that keeps you from the cold vacuum, all of it is my body, not that of a mindless being like you have deluded yourselves into being. And I've grown very, very tired of holding it in this form. When I stop fighting, I will leave you all here to die and return to my Lord. Even if he has not woken, I will do more at his side than I am doing here."

  He turned to walk away, paused, and turned back to you. "Oh," he said. "Don't tell anyone this. It might make it easier for them to keep taking trials, but knowing the truth means that they don't get any credit for attempting a trial. So they'll need to make up for it by taking harder trials. You've already taken that curse upon yourself. You wouldn't want to do it to your friends."

  He started to walk away again. He made it a good distance before Eluvie regained control of her body and ran after him. She grabbed his hand and forced him to look at her.

  "You didn't tell me what I can do," she said. "I asked for how to help you, not your life story. If I can't tell the others this, what should I do?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" he asked. "Be the one who survives. That way, I can give my Lord something when I return. But how will you do it now? You probably wouldn't have passed your trials before. You certainly won't pass them now."

  Eluvie did not let herself believe that. Losing hope was halfway to failure.

  "I will if you teach me," she said, still holding onto his arm. "Be my mentor and I promise, even if I cannot survive till the end, I will teach my mentees to the best of my ability."

  He hesitated for a while, then made a face.

  "No," he said. "It's useless."

  "You have to," she said. "You drunkenly told me all these secrets. Now, my trials will be more difficult. How will I pass them without a competent teacher? And if I fail before I can mentor even one person? How will I make a difference? When you meet your Lord, would you like to tell him that you had one opportunity to fix the problem but you were too drunk to see reason?"

  He blinked several times as if trying to digest the information.

  Finally, he grumbled, "ugh, I can't even tell if you're being reasonable or not. Why did you have to come here and ruin my evening?"

  "I am being reasonable," Eluvie said. "You can't be too drunk to understand that. You're an Illrum, not a human."

  He tore her hand off his arm. "Release me. I'll think about it."

  Eluvie stepped back and bowed deeply. "Thank you, teacher."

  "I said I'll think about it. And, for the record, I have low expectations of you. You have no idea just how much this endeavor will require of you. You will almost certainly fail. But if you survive long enough to train a sensible student, perhaps, in about ten generations, we can produce someone intelligent."

  He had been put off balance by her proposal and was trying to regain control of the situation so she let his insult go. Later, she would parse everything she had said. Later, she would probably grow angry again, when she remembered the friends she had lost and the fact that he could have saved them. But that was for later.

  "When will we have our lessons?" She asked.

  "When I'm not drunk. Go. I'll find you."

  Eluvie didn't leave. "What if you change your mind?"

  He growled at her. "You're not the only one who passed the Test of Virtue. If I say something, I'll do it. Now, get lost. This is my one night of indulgence and you're wasting it."

  Eluvie stepped further away from him, an unspoken indication that he was free to leave. Then, she waited there, trying to reconcile her feelings of rage, fear, and hatred, while he stumbled off.