Redemption

 The world was aged when she came here. Many parts of it were old - hundreds, thousands of years. Unable to be forgotten. Even in a young land like her own, the people would be conquered by these precepts, they would fundamentally act conquered, just like in every other land.

 Not the whole world was flat, not all of it was old, though. She lived in these ostentatious places that tore themselves out of common view, that were not fit for farming, mining, developing. That were not prized, not useful, not heard - and so detached from adjacent places of importance, refused acknowledgement. She would have settled in, eventually, like a cat in a barnyard, with each passing day.

 She was born feral. She grew up in this place with no landmarks of its own - none that others would acknowledge or speak of. Despite this, the stars eventually shone through on the nights with no moon, transposing themselves through columns of dull light that marked the walls of the sky. Her keen eyes saw through the length of the world, for the first time, when she was 17 - on a night like this - to begin to dare, to charge unabashedly through those walls - to make for something worth talking about. Filled with a doubt, not of herself but of everything outside, a feeling that could only be known by what those precious few moments left behind.

 She left on her 19th.

 She cheated fate, it seemed, too many times. In the mines, at the home, in the examinations. It was enough to make some part of her life feel unreal. Undeserved, in a way, but she fought for it every step of the way. Every trial felt impossible, indeed, continued to be impossible in a lot of ways.

 She felt smaller now, even though she wasn't, and the world felt bigger, even though it wasn't. She began to learn, and began to feel, that she wanted to remember and to be remembered. She was told, in the back of her own mind, that it was flattened in those places, because those people wanted to be with each other - wanted to be with her, now. And on the eve, after many days, they offered her a chance for her old home to be acknowledged. To be useful.

 But not the whole world is flat. Her world would never grow old. She would never grow old. She was not like them.

 Were the years to be wound back, she would have said that it was all unfair, this arrangement between peoples and between places. Now, though, she would simply shake her head and walk away.