...

The girl was floating in darkness.

Something was off, but it was so hard to understand what. So hard to care.

It wasn't happiness she was feeling either, it was just a general sense of content. She was powerful and that was all it mattered.

The fire in her heart was burning proudly, harder than see had ever seen it. She reasoned that if she had had eyes, she would have been blinded by it. All her familiar luminous threads were waiting for her. But there were so many more than usual. Some brighter some more faded. Others were split into thousands of little strings, as if a choice could lead to infinite paths.

She could have pulled any, but one in particular captured her attention. It was smaller and white, like a thread of the past. It sang of nature and past love, of familiar and foreign. She leaned in and the vision appeared.

Two people, a man and a woman, were running naked in the forest. They both had brown hair and brown eyes, their skin darkened by sun exposure. They were so beautiful they took her breath away.

They were not running from anything, but for the sole purpose of feeling the wind over their faces and breath in the smells of the forest. They were enjoying being alive.

The man tripped over a brunch and the woman laugh echoed through the forest. It was so pure and crystalline, the girl wanted to laugh with her.

-You will end up killing yourself if you are not careful - she said putting her hands to her waist. She wasn't really scolding him, she was playing.

The young man smiled at her. In the blink of an eye, his body dissolved and reappeared next to the woman. Her smile turned savour.

-I told you not to do that, mortals get scared when we push out magic to the limits. - she said, her hands now around the man's waist.

He kissed her gently on the cheeks, making her blush. -And I think you care way too much about mortals. How many more have you taken as lovers in the past 300 years uhm? - his voice felt like a river in flood, full and rich of power.

The woman laughed and pushed him away. She jumped from one root to another, willing him to follow.

-You know they are just playthings, and I haven't even used one in over three years. You are the only one I love, my dearest. - she said. Her love was so strong flowers around her feet sprung. - And how bold of you to complain about me! Was it me who gave the fire to that lovely young woman? You just changed the paths of the future in a drastic way, always so careless. -

What was the girl witnessing? Why did she have access to these paths?

These were clearly immortals, maybe the first immortals that Nature had ever created. This memory was so far back she couldn't believe that these people could still be alive. She remembered Mat's joke about her inventing the wheel and wondered if she was looking at the two who actually did.

"Mat" she thought. There had been some sort of explosion ... a fire... she was hurt.

The young man smiled wickedly and pulled the woman closer. - Why are you still limiting yourself to this flesh form? The power we could access together would be ... infinite. Together we could become the gods that the mortals pray to. -

The woman put a hand over his face, pushing away tenderly the hair from his brown eyes. -Humans might be fragile, but our bodies also make us feel. I wouldn't want to give my love for you up so easily. -

The man rolled his eyes and gave her a kiss before dissolving in a cloud of mist once again.

All the love from the woman's face disappeared, substituted by a look of wariness. She put a hand protectively over her naked belly, just like Andre had done so many times in the past weeks.

-Don't worry my love, he will come around. - she said to herself, the vision dissolving.

And that's when the pain begun.