Then she’d walk about my rooms in her dirty neglected garments staring at the cracks in the plaster or the light caught in the distortions of the hand-blown window glass. Why should immortals pore over newspapers, she would ask, or dwell in palaces? Or carry gold in their pockets? Or write letters to a mortal family left behind? In an eerie, rapid undertone she’d speak of cliffs she had climbed, the drifts of snow through which she had tumbled, the caves full of mysterious markings and ancient fossils that she had found.
