“Forti!” Panting down the hall stood Wyver.  

The moment shattered, like a dropped glass bottle smashing into many precarious pieces that no one would clean after. She looked at her brother, then back up at Rongyae, hand withdrawing. 

“Don’t worry Forti,” Rongyae said. His shrewd smile reappeared as if everything before was only a dream. “There will be one test coming soon that you’ll have to go through to actually get in ValorA, but I believe in you. All you have to do is believe in yourself and be you.” 

He almost walked away, but remembered another thing.

“Oh, and I lied again. I came here to scout you out, but everything else I said was true. The school will send a formal letter about your sister’s results on the official release date, so don’t blame the school for what I did here today. I wanted to meet you for myself.”

With a final wave, Rongyae vanished around the corner. Wyver sprinted up to Forti, brows furrowed over the stranger and his elder sister’s safety. He lifted up his veil.

“Forti, who was that?” Forti raised her own.

“Someone from ValorA.” She caught her brother’s flinch. “He told me Vasi made it in ValorA.”

“…Anything else?” 

“I’ll tell you later. Is the cremation starting?” Wyver nodded.

Forti and Wyver, faces covered once more, joined the gathering around Vasi, who was carried in her flammable, ivory coffin. Placed on a translucent tray pulled from one of the furnaces, she looked like she was sleeping in an unenclosed cocoon, floating above ground. Forti petted it lovingly as if it were a tender creature. 

Goodbye Vasi. 

Only Vasi occupied her entirety, the encounter with the feigned encomiur basically forgotten.

Now that the siblings had arrived, the funeral could end. Gently, the wall swallowed the body, and the pastor closed the door. She escorted the group into a room. Behind a glass pane on a lower floor, the casket was in a transparent box to be engulfed in white flames, the color caused by emrephor salts filled in the ducts. 

In their elevated area, like an operating theater, people took their seats, family sitting at the front. Forti gazed at where Vasi’s face should be, shrouded by the flowering design. After today, only ash and the ornament cloths spread over her sister would remain, the latter to be flown like kites for four days before being given to her parents. 

Goodbye Vasi.

“Are you all ready?” Reverend Liues asked in a low, discreet tone to the parents, who gripped each other’s hands with resolved wills and banished tears.

“Yes,” Forti’s mother said with a voice drenched with mourning, but absent of any waver. Forti scrunched her eyes. Goodbye Vasi. I’ll miss you. I’ll always miss you.

Small, alabaster flames licked the sides of the cocoon, and Forti’s heart beat like a war drum. It was all she could feel, and then the sensation infinitely metamorphosized. To blood coursing in her vessels, electricity streaking through her brain, sinews pulling muscle and bone, lungs expanding with every breath. Awareness of her material existence heightened uncontrollably near a zenith of complete dominion over mortal flesh, bordering the spiritual. She could think of nothing about what was happening to her, she could only feel. 

And heat mounted Forti’s arms, legs, and temples. Her back was under a siege of benignly warm whips, but an animalistic instinct frightened her of its eventual severity, of cruel, hot lashings that could melt skin and burn blood. Something had breached her being within the blur. Her body was not only her own. And just as she saw it down below, simultaneous as the setting of the sun and ascension of the moon, she felt her chest rise. 

“STOP! STOP THE CREMATION!” She dashed out the observatory. Her parents, experienced from years of handling three, problematically intelligent children, were quick to react, and ordered the bewildered pastor to cancel the fires. Everyone flew after Forti, who tugged at the incinerator door frantically. Her paternal grandfather strided to his granddaughter to have her cease such a distressing act, but Wyver stepped forward as a shield. 

Forti’s scream ignited him, as if through her voice a mysterious force entered and proliferated inside his soul, and he knew, without understanding, why she did what she did. He felt it, too.

Forti jerked the tray out. The coffin’s underside and flanks were singed, and the smoke smelled like burnt wood, nothing acrid. She whipped her veil over her head and peered in. She couldn’t tell if hope deluded her sight or if she saw truth. As delicate as a feather, she pulled down the fabric over her sister’s face.

Vasi was as pale as a corpse. Forti stared at closed eyes, then leaned over, and pressed her ear to her sister’s chest. She waited. A weak thump resounded. 

She drew back, like something leapt at her, and went to listen again. 

Thump… Thump… 

It was slow and feeble, but it was there. Concentrating, she could hear the frail inhale and exhale of a life holding on. Forti looked at her brother, at her parents. She wasn’t sure if this was real, and ushered them over. Her mother leaned, just as Forti did, tears sprung in her eyes.

“Vasibeth! Oh– Oh Pahth!” Her mother fell to her knees, grabbing Vasi’s frigid hand as she dropped. She clutched it like it was rope at the edge of a cliff. 

“Pahth, thank you. Thank you. Oh, Vasibeth, can you hear me? Vasibeth.” 

Forti’s father looked intensely at Vasi with bated breath, and perceived the extremely subtle rise and fall of her torso.

“She’s alive,” he whispered without meaning to.

The people clamored around to witness it for themselves.

“Oh my Pahth!”

“She’s really alive?!”

“It’s a miracle!”

Rongyae had long left the establishment. He rode the unmanned aerial lift down the mountain, and strolled on a destitute dirt path of wildflowers and overgrown grass. An older woman with a long scar between her eyes, slanted to the right down the bridge of her nose, leaned against a black, tinted car, awaiting him. She was admiring the scenery above with folded arms when she heard the crunch of twigs and kicks of dry soil. 

“What was she like?” She asked.

“Interesting,” Rongyae replied. “But she’s not the one.”

“That’s too bad. I was hoping in my lifetime I’d get to meet her. Guess the world will have to wait another some centuries.”

Rongyae threw himself in the passenger seat and sank into the plush leather. 

“Hahhh… The moment we get even a hint, the universe rips it away. If I see that suearis, I swear I’ll tear him to ribbons.”

“Hey, don’t get any ideas. I’m telling if you go AWOL.”

“I won’t, I won’t. I wasn’t expecting much from the sister anyways.”

Liar, thought the woman as she started the car.