SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Forty-Seven
Observation of Time
Allow me to pause this story, just for a couple pages, to tell you about my first observations on the matter of time.
A great deal happened to me during my first century, and most of it happened in France. It was a period like any other, filled with countless variations of both happiness and suffering.
I might tell you about lycan born in Burgundy, coming of age because of my proximity. Or of how the Dijon pack one night returned to our fortress to seek revenge. Or of the Paris pack that, disbelieving the tales of my powers, foolishly arrived on our doorstep to learn the truth for themselves.
I might tell you about the great love that came between Maximo and me while we lived as the Baron and Baroness du Roussade. I see how that might not appear obvious here. I’ve only shared some of its early moments with you, most of which were fraught with danger. But the truth is we grew to love each other so deeply that describing its profound intimacy in these pages feels very much like a betrayal.
I might tell you about the tremendous social changes throughout the land during the 18th Century. Or of how the light, as Sempronio would’ve called it, spread from Paris to challenge the dogma of millennia. Each day, more minds were freed from the darkness of religion, ushering forth a new secular era that gave birth to the real miracles of modern science.
I might tell you of how I took a hand in such changes. Of how I organized a women’s march in Versailles. Of how the sorrow and frustration of wives and mothers, born from the empty cupboards of a starving nation, rose to send the monarchy back to Paris, where it eventually observed its own demise.
All the events that led to the end of the Ancien Regime were vital to me, but only because they shaped the world I lived in. I grew in ways I could not have foreseen, ways that the tutelage of an ancient master could only hint at.
But it’s essential for this memoir, or chronicle, as my beloved Daniel Archer would call it, that you allow me to pull you forward past all those experiences. Please humor me to view them as little more than my first significant passage of time.
Upon reflection through that lens, the 18th Century was the materialization of Sempronio’s most important lesson to me. It gave me my first insight into what he had long understood about time: that it has the power to change every single thing, including the very nature of our minds.
Within that span, I witnessed the principles of liberty take hold of nations controlled by every other type of rule. These were ideas I’d only known in Sempronio’s house, described by him or by the venerable historians he quoted. They were ideas of freedom, fleeting throughout history, and available only to the wealthy, who desired anything but liberty for all. Nevertheless, that light reemerged into the world, and it somehow filled the minds of people who knew almost nothing about the distant past.
The changes I witnessed were only recognizable because I could look back to see them over such a distance. They revealed the first inkling of what the master had prepared me to understand. Who I was at the beginning differed significantly from who I was at the end.
While writing this story down now, it’s been an exercise in discipline to keep my modern observations from polluting my recollected thoughts. Like Sempronio, I find it nearly impossible to recognize the child I was through the eyes of the woman I am now.
So, if you will, set aside the hundred chapters of my life that took place in France. I’ve already told you of the powers that came to me, and I find no need to tell you more about how they changed my life. Perhaps I will mention those events at another time; possibly, others will do it for me. I feel too impatient to discuss who I was at the beginning any longer. Instead, step forward with me in leaps to learn of who I became. Allow me to tell you the parts of my story that I genuinely want you to know.