From Belleren, Concerning an Elf Who Had Outlived a Street

I took supper tonight with Seraiel Therin, whom I first met twenty-six years ago and who looks, infuriatingly, almost exactly as she did then. She is eight hundred and twelve. This was not the melancholy part.

After dinner we walked through the district where she had lived as a young woman. Almost nothing remains from that period. The houses are newer and the old canal has been covered over. A railway terminus now occupies the grove where her family once gathered.

She was not especially sentimental about any of this, which surprised me at first. Human writers often portray Elves as creatures perpetually haunted by the passage of time, wandering sadly through places where everyone they loved has died, and Seraiel finds the stereotype irritating. She said that if one lives long enough, change ceases to feel like an intrusion and becomes the ordinary condition of being alive. She remembers six different buildings on the same corner, a slaughterhouse where the present city hall stands, and a river dock where there is now a bank.

What troubled her was much smaller. There had once been a bakery on a narrow lane nearby, run by a Human family she knew across four generations. The business finally closed some sixty years ago when the last descendant moved west, and she could still remember the smell of the ovens in winter.

“I keep turning the corner expecting it to be there,” she said. There was a telegraph office where the bakery had been, and I found this disproportionately sad.