The morning started with glitter. Lots of glitter. Teacher Milly had set up what she called the "Sparkle History Station"—tubs of glue, popsicle sticks, and every color of glitter imaginable.
"Today we're going to make historical sparkle portraits!" Milly announced, her own glitter-covered hands raised. "Pick a famous figure from the past and make them sparkle-tastic!"
Astraea sat between Leo and Chloe, the wing buds between her shoulder blades giving their now-familiar twitch. Leo was already frowning at his paper, green finger glowing faintly as he tried to decide between "Sir Isaac Newton" and "The First Sparkle-Bearer, whoever that was."
Chloe giggled as she poured pink glitter onto her portrait of what appeared to be a princess with rainbow hair. "I'm making Queen Sparkleina!"
"A wise choice," Astraea said, dipping her brush into silver glue. She began to trace careful lines on her paper.
"Who are you making, Raea?" Leo asked, peering over.
"Two kings," she said softly.
Surface: It's for the project!
Internal: They deserve to be remembered, even like this.
The lesson proper began after clean-up, with twenty sticky, glittering portraits drying on the windowsill. Milly had decorated the Sparkle Room with construction-paper crowns and cardboard swords. A timeline was taped to the wall, bright with marker-drawn castles and explosions labeled "Great Magic Boom!"
"Now, friends," Milly said, clapping for attention, "we're going to learn about the very first Awakened! Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, two magical kings fought to decide who would rule the land!"
Astraea's just-finished portrait of Alistair and Morwen stared up from her desk, their glitter eyes catching the light. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago. The phrase was so vague, so human. To them, anything before their grandparents was ancient history. To her, it was yesterday's argument that had left a scar on the land.
"King Alistair the Golden could make light from his hands!" Milly pointed to a yellow crown on the timeline. "And King Morwen the Shadow could whisper to the dark! They were the best of friends until… the Great Disagreement!"
Astraea remembered the schism. She'd been napping in the Alps, the deep rock warm against her hibernating metabolism, when the magical backlash had rippled through the ley lines. It hadn't felt like a "Great Disagreement." It had felt like two children screaming over a toy, their nascent mana manipulations tearing at the fabric of local reality.
"They fought for fourteen long years!" Milly continued, her voice dipping into a dramatic whisper. "The whole land shook with their power!"
Fourteen years, Astraea thought, watching a silver sparkle drift from her fingertip without her conscious command. I blinked and missed the last thirty. The war had been a brief, bloody footnote during her long stasis.
"And then," Milly said, raising a finger, "on the final day, they realized fighting was wrong! They joined their powers together and created the First Sparkle, a beacon of peace that ended the war forever!"
Astraea's sparkle flickered and died. That… was not what happened.
Memory: Final Battle of Blackwater Fen. Outcome: Mutual annihilation via mana implosion. Result: Temporal scar 'The Silent Minute,' not a beacon.
"And that's why," Milly concluded, beaming, "we use our powers for friendship and sparkles, not for fighting!"
The children nodded, wide-eyed. Chloe clasped her glittery hands together. "They became friends again at the end. That's nice."
They became atoms, Astraea corrected silently. There was nothing left to be friends.
"Does anyone have questions?" Milly asked.
Leo's hand shot up. "My grandpa says most of the stories from back then are guesses. How do we know that's really how it happened?"
Milly's smile didn't falter, but it tightened at the edges—a teacher's smile facing a question without a clean answer. "That's a very grown-up question, Leo! Historians have studied very old books and artifacts. They've put the story together like a puzzle! Sometimes the truth is what helps us be better people today."
Astraea looked at the cheerful, inaccurate timeline. The dates were off by a decade. The portraits were based on Romantic-era paintings, not the gaunt, desperate men she remembered. The "Great Magic Boom" was depicted as a firework, not the reality-warping implosion that had briefly made the sky fractal.
It wasn't malicious. It was just… forgetting. Sanding down the sharp, terrible edges of history until it was safe for children's ears. Transforming mutual destruction into a lesson about sharing.
"What do you think, Astraea?" Milly asked, noticing her silence. "Isn't it wonderful that they chose peace?"
Astraea met her teacher's expectant gaze. The woman was kind. She believed she was teaching something good. The truth—that two powerful men had obliterated each other in a fit of pride and fear, leaving a hole in the world that still chilled that patch of fen—would not make these children feel safe. It would not promote "sparkle safety."
So she gave the expected answer, her voice perfectly calibrated. "It's wonderful," she said, and almost meant it, because the alternative was too heavy for this sunlit room full of glitter.
Inside, the ancient part of her grieved. Not for the kings—they'd been fools. But for the loss of truth. For the way time smoothed everything into stories, erasing the grit and pain and complexity.
"Great!" Milly said, clapping again. "Now, for our last activity, we're going to make Crowns of Friendship! Everyone gets two colors of sparkle paper—one gold, one silver—to weave together! Just like the kings joining their powers!"
As the children set to work, chattering about colors and whose crown would be sparkliest, Astraea carefully wove her strips. Gold for Alistair, who'd had a kind smile when he wasn't trying to dominate the western ley lines. Silver for Morwen, who'd written surprisingly delicate poetry before the void-taint twisted his mind.
She didn't make a Crown of Friendship. She made a circlet of mourning. A tiny, silent memorial for two lost souls who were now nothing but a wrong lesson in a kindergarten classroom.
"Yours looks different," Chloe said, peering at Astraea's work. "More… serious."
"It's a memorial crown," Astraea said before she could stop herself.
"What's a memorial?"
"Something to remember people who are gone."
Chloe considered this, then went back to her own wildly sparkly creation. "Mine's to remember how fun today was!"
[System notification!]
[Achievement unlocked: 'History helper!']
[Description: You participated in a historical learning activity with a great attitude!]
[Reward: 'Good listener' Title, +5 to Cooperation stat]
[Note: Learning about the past helps us build a better future! Keep sparkling!]
Astraea looked at the notification, then at her inaccurate crown, then at the children around her happily creating their simplified past.
You build the future on sand, she thought, and call it bedrock.
That evening, as Mrs. Evans helped her wash glitter out of her hair ("Goodness, you're sparkling from scalp to toes!"), Astraea felt the weight of the day. Not a bad weight. A familiar one. The weight of carrying truth in a world that preferred stories.
She measured her height once Mrs. Evans had gone to make dinner. 0.37 cm cumulative. The growth continued, steady and true, a timeline written in her own flesh and bone, impossible to simplify or misinterpret.
The past might be malleable to humans. But her body remembered. Her cells, now dividing after centuries, carried a history that no lesson could erase.
She placed the paper crown on her windowsill. The gold and silver caught the moonlight, for a moment looking almost real. Almost true.
Tomorrow: more simplified history. The day after: more true growth. The great remembering continued, even as the world forgot.