As I set off south, I still couldn't shake this niggling feeling that Solenn, the location of Izena's mother's death, was not the right place to look for Her mana, containing the remnant of Her mind, whose decisions would be determined by Her core, identify-defining mission as a person at the time of Her death, the very desire that had been strong enough for Her mana to hold itself together through sheer force of will.

The site of Her death near Rokesha was plausible. Lingering there, not moving at all, would have been appropriate if Izena's core, foundational desire was to fight to protect the world, or Her family, or even if She was just very proud and didn't want to lose. I could believe any of these, they were all consistent with Her, but Izena was not there. I had looked.

The Corza family home in Ezenta was plausible, too. If Izena had been driven in Her innermost core by a desire for calm family life, for the war to be over so She could live in peace at Our home, then She could have drifted there. This too I could believe, but Izena thankfully was not there. I feared what might have happened to Her had mages in Ezenta noticed.

But was Izena's defining trait a desire to go to Her mother's side in Solenn? Did She regret not being there to save her or something? I had included this entry on the list as an edge possibility, but I had just never gotten this sense from Her. I liked to think I knew Her well enough to be confident that while Her mother was important to Her, she was not that critical to who She was. Likewise, I missed Mama and Daddy, I was sad that they had died, but not to the extent that these feelings would drive My posthumous mana to the places where they had died. I was confident of that. My judgment was that Izena was similar.

But then where? What was I missing?

I refused to believe that Izena was really gone, that this was a doomed search because She wasn't anywhere. There was no way She would leave Me all alone if She was capable of not doing so. That was completely inconsistent with everything She had been as--

My eyes widened, My breathing stopped, and My ears started ringing. I almost fell off My platform.

I didn't dare to believe it at first. It felt arrogant. Could it really be true?

Could it be that Izena's core, driving, innermost desire, the thing that most determined who She was, the feeling currently determining the behavior of Her mana when all else was stripped away and compressed, the feeling that had consumed Her at the moment of Her death, that had been so powerful that Her will had refused to allow Her mana to dissipate and instead imprinted that same core directive inside it for all time, had been:

"I do not want to leave Menelyn alone. She will need to be comforted. She will need her big sister. She will be sad and lonely and hurt and thinking less of herself. I want to hug her. She will need a hug, but she will think that she is tainted, and shouldn't be hugged. I will need to be there, to hug her anyway."

I gulped, eyes misted. This...this right here was consistent with what My Sister had been, the entire time that I had known Her.

I steered my platform a little bit to the west. I was still headed to a location far to the south, but not to Solenn.

When I passed over the equator, which marked roughly the boundary between the territories that had been depopulated and those that had survived, there was a marked change in the nature of the landscape.

This land was rugged. It was less developed. There were fewer people, fewer villages, the towns were smaller. Civilization still had not recovered here, after nearly 1000 years. Too much had been destroyed, too much lost. Why move south? It would feel like moving into your murdered neighbor's house. And, your neighbor lived far from the market, far from your family, far from everything. The only people who would be driven to move there would be stubborn former refugees moving back home, but even many refugees would have no desire to return to a place of trauma and despair.

It was a distressing period of flight.

After days of travel, the crossroads that was My destination came into view on the horizon. The roads were not as well-kept now as they had been, but to the extent that people still lived in the south, this was still a major intersection, so the roads were still there.

Once upon a time, I had been a five year old girl at a refugee camp, located here. Izena and Azenum had come to escort the refugees north. They had found me, standing at the base of a rock in order to be as unobtrusive as possible, covered in mud and grime and Mama's rotting guts and dried blood, waiting for someone to tell me where I was supposed to go.

Not even daring to wait for someone to give me a hug. It would have made them so dirty and smelly. I couldn't wish for such things. Such things would be too magical for me. I should set my sights lower, and wish for only those things that were of low enough value for me to be worthy of them.

Izena had answered a prayer that day that I lacked the audacity to conceive. That day, She had been Salvation. Then She had kept doing it every day for fifteen years. And then She had died, and kept doing it through my memories.

That very same rock, the one I had stood next to, was still here.

The base on the northern side was blacker than it had any right to be, with two Suns in the sky shining directly on it.