She looked, at first, like part of the landscape.
I want to be precise about this, because it matters to everything that came after: I did not see a person and fail to recognize her as one. I saw a shape on a low rise of pale stone, roughly upright, roughly the size and proportion of any silhouette, and some old, buried, plant-deep part of me — the part that spent longer than I have ever been able to properly count rooted in silence, unable to move, watching light change without being able to turn toward it — recognized what she was doing before the rest of me had even consciously registered that she was there at all.
She was waiting for the sun.
Not in the ordinary sense that anyone in the Between might wait for the sun — as a marker of time passing, a thing to note and move past. She was waiting for it the way I once waited for it, in the years before I had a body capable of waiting for anything else: with her whole self oriented toward the place on the horizon where the light was strongest, utterly motionless, utterly patient, in a stillness so complete it took me three full minutes of walking closer before I trusted my own eyes enough to stop and actually look.
She did not turn when my footsteps became audible. She did not turn when I came close enough that any silhouette — any soul who had lived any kind of life before this one — would have turned, out of instinct if nothing else, the animal wariness of being approached by something unknown in an empty place. She simply stood there, faceless as all of us are faceless, a column of pale silhouette-light against gray stone, tilted very slightly toward the horizon, and waited.
I stopped a respectful distance away. Old habits, some of them mine and some of them borrowed from watching how careful souls are with each other in a world where none of us can touch without consequence, none of us can reach out and simply confirm that the thing in front of us is real. "Hello," I said, because it seemed like the correct thing to say to anyone, even a silhouette standing as strangely still as this one.
Nothing. Not even the small shift of attention that passes for a glance, among people who have no faces to glance with — a kind of subtle reorientation of presence that every soul learns to read, eventually, the silhouette-equivalent of eye contact. She gave me none of it. She kept facing the horizon, waiting, as if I were simply one more feature of a landscape that had nothing to do with the thing she was doing.
I have met souls in shock before. I have met souls freshly arrived, still reeling from the specific vertigo of realizing they have died, that everything they were is now folded down into a shape with no name and no face standing in a world made of stone and quiet. I assumed, at first, that this was simply an extreme version of that — grief calcified into paralysis, a soul so thrown by its own death that it had simply stopped, the way anything overwhelmed enough eventually stops.
"It's all right," I said, closer now, gentling my voice the way you would for something frightened, though nothing about her posture read as frightened, exactly. Frightened souls tremble, even in silhouette form — some vestigial memory of a body still runs through them, some old electric signal insisting on a physical response to fear even when the body it belonged to is gone. She wasn't trembling. She was simply, perfectly, entirely still, in the specific quality of stillness that isn't a reaction to anything at all. It is a state. A native one.
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I had felt that state before. I had lived inside it for longer than most civilizations exist.
Something in my chest went very quiet, then, in the particular way it goes quiet around things that remind me of what I used to be before I was anything at all.
I circled her, slowly, the careful half-circle you make around something you don't yet understand and don't want to startle, though startling did not appear to be a risk with her — nothing in her attention shifted no matter where I stood. From the front, from the side, from behind — she simply held her orientation toward the horizon and the light coming up over it, patient in a way that had nothing performative in it, nothing put on for an audience. She did not know I was an audience. I don't think, in that moment, she knew she had an audience at all.
"Can you hear me?" I asked, and then, because that felt like it might be the wrong question — I have learned, since, that it was exactly the wrong question, though I didn't understand why yet — I tried something simpler. "Are you all right?"
Silence. Not a refusal to answer. A silence with no listener behind it, the specific silence of a question that had nowhere inside her to land.
I want to be honest about what I felt in that moment, because Ilyrisse deserves the honest version and not the version I've smoothed into something more comfortable over time in the retelling: I felt afraid. Not of her — nothing about her posed any threat, nothing about a soul standing quietly on a hillside waiting for sunlight has ever posed a threat to anyone — but afraid in the older, colder sense, the sense of looking at something and recognizing, with a jolt that went all the way down to whatever passes for my bones, that I was looking at a mirror. A mirror of a version of myself I try very hard not to remember in too much detail, because the years I spent as a Void Plant, rootbound and silent and endlessly, endlessly waiting, are not years I survived so much as years I simply outlasted, the way stone outlasts weather rather than surviving it in any sense that implies struggle.
She was doing what I used to do. She was standing the way I used to stand. And she was doing it here, now, in a world that had already given her a body capable of walking away from that stillness any time she chose — except, I understood slowly, with the particular dread of understanding something true and unbearable at the same time, she did not know that. She did not know she had a choice. Whatever she had been, before this, had not come with the concept of choosing built into it.
The sun — or the pale, diffuse imitation of one that the Between offers in place of an actual star, that slow gray-gold brightening along the horizon that never quite resolves into a disc you could point to — rose further, and something in her posture eased, very slightly, the way a plant's leaves ease toward warmth. Not joy, exactly. Nothing so complex as joy. Something more like relief, the animal relief of a need finally being met, uncomplicated by any awareness that the need could ever have gone unmet, or that it was strange to have it at all.
I sat down, then, some distance from her, because I did not know what else to do, and because some part of me — the part that had spent an age of the universe learning that patience is not a virtue so much as the only tool you have — understood, before I could have explained it to anyone, that whatever this was, it would not be reached by force, or by volume, or by any of the ordinary tools people use to get another person's attention. It would be reached, if it could be reached at all, the same slow way everything in my own long unmaking had ever been reached.
By staying.