Lathrienne

Lathrienne, called Keeper of the Memory, came to Lysanthir as most wanderers come to a place: without announcement, without a clear reason, and without much in the way of explanation. She had woken once with no memory of who she was or where she belonged, and if that beginning troubled her, she did not let it slow her feet. She walked, and kept walking, carrying no destination on her map. What she did carry, and carried in quantity, was books: her satchel crowded with thin, weathered volumes, their pages repaired with cloth after rain had ruined the edges. A baker met in a village whose name she could no longer pronounce. A child who had insisted every bird in the world belonged to her. A town swallowed beneath a landslide two winters after she left. She had written them all down, because people forgot, because places changed, because buildings fell and names disappeared.

She had followed a warm, golden light between the crimson trunks one evening, a light that was not sunlight, and the trees had parted onto Lysanthir itself: a settlement hidden deep within the red forest, unlike anything in her books. For the first time in years she hesitated before reaching for her notebook. She had the peculiar feeling, she would later say, that this was not a place she had merely discovered. Perhaps she had finally been found. It was not long before she encountered someone among Lysanthir's paths: a woman, composed and impossibly calm, green hair catching what little light remained beneath the canopy, standing as though the crimson forest itself had grown around her. Lathrienne tightened her grip on her satchel strap and spoke, carefully, into the quiet.

She told the woman she had been travelling through the forest, that she had not known a settlement was there. She considered leaving. She had done it countless times before: apologize, thank them, continue walking. Instead her feet refused to move, held by something strangely peaceful in the place, something her books had not yet named. When the woman's gaze fell on the satchel, Lathrienne drew it closer without thinking. It is nothing of value, she said, and then corrected herself quietly: not in the usual sense. Her journals, she admitted, the places she had visited, written down so they would not be lost. She seemed almost embarrassed by the admission, which was itself a small thing worth noting, for a woman who had built her whole life around the act of remembering.