“Indeed not,” Alera said. She adjusted her dress as if it were any other cloth and knelt beside him. “That is something you must understand about me, young Gaius. I may appear in a form similar to yours, but I am not a being of flesh and blood. I do not feel as you do, about any number of things.”

Tavi tried to focus on a firecrafting that would begin to build up the heat in his body, but there was so little left that it would be a lengthy process, assuming he could manage it at all. He needed an open source of flame to make it simple, but there wasn’t one. “W-what d-do y-you m-mean?”

“Your potential death, for example,” she said. “You could freeze to death on this floor, right now. It wouldn’t particularly upset me.”

Tavi thought it a fine thing to keep focusing on his firecrafting. “Wh-why not?”

She smiled at him and brushed a strand of hair back from his forehead. It crackled, and a few bits of ice fell down over his eyelashes. “All things die, young Gaius,” she said. Her eyes went distant for a moment, and she sighed. “All things. And I am old—far, far older than you could comprehend.”

“H-how o-old?”

“You have no frame of reference that is useful,” she said. “Your mind is exceptionally capable, but even you could scarcely imagine a quantity of one million objects, much less the activity of a million years. I have seen thousands of millions of years, Octavian. In a time such as that, oceans swell and die away. Deserts become green farmlands. Mountains are ground to dust and valleys, and new mountains are born in fire. The earth itself flows like water, great ranges of land spinning and colliding, and the stars themselves spin and reel into new shapes.” She smiled. “It is the great dance, Aleran, and the lifetime of your race is but a beat within a measure.”

Tavi shivered even harder. That was a good sign, he knew. It meant that more blood was getting to his muscles. They were slowly getting warmer. He kept up the firecrafting.

“In that time,” she said, “I have seen the deaths of many things. Entire species come and go, like the sparks rising from a campfire. Understand, young Gaius. I bear you no ill will. But any given single life is a matter of such insignificance that, honestly, I have trouble telling one of you from the next.”

“I-if that’s true,” Tavi said, “th-then wh-why a-are you h-here with me?”

She gave him a rueful smile. “Perhaps I am indulging a whim.”

“P-perhaps you aren’t t-telling the whole tr-truth.”