It had been more than a thousand years since she had last visited the place that had been known at the time as Canrif, the Cymrian word for century. It had been so named because a First Generationer named Hague, Gwylliam the Visionary’s best friend and confidant, had famously told the first Lord Cymrian that within a century the citadel in the mountains he was designing would be the greatest civilization the world had ever seen. Fool, she thought now as she had then. What did you know of what the world has seen? I, and those like me, who were around at the beginning of this world, know of secrets and civilizations that you could never even imagine. Her excitement was diminished somewhat by the memory of what had driven her out of the place long ago. She had been in male form at that time, occupying the body of a low-level soldier in Gwylliam’s standing army; she had still been weak, even after the millennia that had passed since her escape from the Vault when it was ruptured by the impact of Melita, the Sleeping Child, a piece of a dead star that had fallen out of the sky and into the depths of the sea.
