Her home had died, and she did not know why. Of course, that ignorance could be forgiven--she was only 57 and her own species did not age as fast as humans. Indeed, they aged at a tenth of the speed.

So Sa’ura looked at the crater, red eyes wide and brimming with tears for a reason she didn’t quite understand, listening for familiar feet indenting the ground and feeling too cold in the height of a summer day in the browning hills of North Greykyte, just west of the mountains.

Beside her stood one of her father’s bodyguards. He was an older-looking man of a mere 34 years known to her as ‘Bagheera Kiplingi,’ who appeared ever-odd in her eyes due to his harsh features and pupiled eyes. She wondered why her father had hired him, given that most humans in the area hated her kind.

“Little Miss?” He called her back from that place that she couldn’t yet comprehend, as he glanced at her with his brown eyes.

“Will you be all right?” he asked, tone tinged with emotion.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She was confused, not having fallen and not yet getting what had happened to cause the black crater.

“Could you please…let me know when you aren’t okay anymore?” His words got stuck in his throat like a too-large piece of apple, and she thought the question odd.

“Sure?” She tilted her head, causing a blonde pigtail to brush her neck and thinking that it was probably best to answer him, though it seemed to have nothing to do with what they were looking at, with what they were doing. “Let’s go see Mommy!” His face twisted then, making him look a bit like her mommy did before she began to cry and cry and cry…

“She might not be there…” He still sounded like something was stuck, like something was trying to get out but had no way to.

This upset her greatly, making her face twist in anger. “She WILL!"

“But if she’s not?”

“Then you did something to her!” She wasn’t quite capable of pronouncing the ‘th’ sound, but thought her point clear.

“When could I have, Miss Ch’irodöter?” He tried pointing out the gap in her logic.

“You just did!”

“Little Miss, the town has been blown up. If your mother is there, it is as a corpse and if she is not—if she is alive—she likely left willingly to another town relatively nearby,” Bagheera bluntly announced, sounding very irritated. Yet he still seemed kind of--was it concerned? Or was he worried about something else?

“What’s a corpse? And Mommy wouldn’t leave our home!” She protested with confusion and disbelief, not noticing his surprise at her question.

Giving a sigh, he responded with audible irritation, “Look, we’ll check the ruins for her, so we should go ahead and walk downhill to do so, understand?”

“GOOD!” snapped Sa’ura.

"Why did I take this job?…there were perfectly good ones in my own country that wouldn’t have wound up with me taking care of a kid," Bagheera muttered to himself.

“What did you say?” She questioned, having heard part of his mutterings.

“Nothing of concern, Little Miss,” he responded, calmer than he had been, as they reached the bottom of the hill.

As they approached the town, she began to notice the smell, a stench that made her think of a rotting horse her family had once passed on the way to visit her cousins and Uncle Gn’och when she was in her 40’s and liked icky boys that ate bugs and let her play Hide-And-Seek or Catch-The-Ball with them.

And then it blew into her eyes, a thousand tiny hammers masquerading as the wind, doing their best to smash her eyes back and into her brain before she could see Mommy and Daddy again and tell them what a big meanie this bodyguard was, saying they had left like Great-Grandmother had all those years ago.

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Mommy was there but she wouldn’t move. Mommy felt cold like it was winter and she’d gone out without a coat, but it was summer so she should have felt warm like Sa’ura felt on the outside, even though she was cold inside.

“Make Mommy talk…” Sa’ura felt broken.

“I cannot. She won’t move again. She will never talk to you again. She’s gone.” With words less complicated than most adults used, he explained the reasons.

How could he be so calm when Mommy wasn’t moving, wasn’t warm? Didn’t he care about her? Didn’t he care that this was her mommy?

“Bring Mommy back…”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll…I’ll give you all my toys if you do!” she offered.

He shot her down with the words, “I cannot bring her back. Giving me things will not suddenly mean that I can!”

“Please! I know you can bring back Mommy!” She begged desperately, tears welling up in her eyes.

“No, I can bring back something that acts like her. Not your actual mother, no one is capable of truly bringing back the dead, no matter how much we wish it were so, Sa’ura,” he spoke with sadness, like he missed his mommy too.

“But…I want my mommy back!” she cried, tears and snot alike beginning to run in streams down her face.

“I know. You want her back, and you would trade everything that you have, everything that you are for her return, but she will never come back. There is no way to return from the place she has gone, no matter who one is.”

“I want…I want Mommy…” Sa’ura’s words were barely audible, and the crying had evolved into full-blown sobbing.

“I know,” was his simple statement.

She sniffed through her tears, rubbing her eyes and trying to stop crying, wanting to be a big girl like her mommy had always said she was.

“It’s all right if you want to cry. I sobbed for months when my parents died,” he seemed kinder now, and his eyes looked softer. He didn’t look like he would mind if she clutched him.

So she grabbed to him and cried, and did not know for how long. When at last her tears had dried — for the moment — the moons were high in the sky, one full and the other a mere sliver.

With the night so far in and her having cried, it was no surprise to either that she was tired. And so she slept.

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She awoke in a bed, the sun melting the sky into evening. Bagheera lay in the corner, still quietly asleep.

“He…carried me?” She was surprised, having thought that he, if not hated her, then disliked her, and that he would not have carried her to another town so that they could rest.

Her thoughts drifted to her mother. To the fact that she would no longer be coming home to her mommy’s kind words and gentle hugs. That no longer would she come home to find her mom doing housework. That her mom could no longer find time for her because she was gone, and gone for forever. And it was cold, though it was summer.

“Those feelings of loss will pass,” was what Bagheera, now awake, interrupted her thoughts with.

“Maybe. Maybe…” She was still sad, but might feel better in time.