The sage was silent for a long moment after I finished speaking. The butter lamp flickered, casting dancing shadows on the cave walls. Outside, the wind continued its eternal conversation with the peaks.
"He was your teacher," the sage said finally. "But more than that. He was your father, in all the ways that matter."
"Yes," I whispered. "He was."
"And the languages he taught you—they have opened doors."
"Many doors. In many lands. I have found my king in places I never could have reached without them. I have spoken to dying men in their own tongues and given them comfort. I have read texts that held the secrets of forgotten worlds. Every word Khru Prasert gave me has been a key."
The sage nodded slowly. "He knew what he was doing. Not consciously, perhaps. But his soul recognized yours. He saw the centuries you carried, even if his mortal mind could not name them. And he gave you the tools you would need to carry them further."
I thought of Khru Prasert's final words—I am simply becoming part of you—and felt the truth of them resonate in my chest. Four hundred years later, he was still with me. Every time I spoke one of the languages he had taught me, every time I remembered his laugh, his stories, his quiet, enduring love, he lived.
"You carry too much," the sage said, drawing me back to the present. His voice was gentle, but his eyes held the weight of absolute truth. "You carry every loss, every goodbye, every moment of arriving too late. This is not grief. This is a prison of your own making."
I felt the words land in my chest like stones. Not because they were new—I had heard variations of them before, from Khru Prasert himself, from others across the centuries. But because in this moment, in this cave at the roof of the world, with the ancient Sanskrit still echoing between us, I could no longer pretend they weren't true.
"How do I stop?" I asked him.
The sage laughed—a dry, rustling sound like prayer flags in a mountain wind. It was not a cruel laugh, but it held no comfort either. It was the laugh of someone who had watched the seasons turn for longer than I could imagine, who understood that some questions were themselves a form of clinging.
"You do not stop," he said. "You transform."
He picked up a small stone from the cave floor and held it out to me. I took it. It was cold, ordinary, unremarkable.
"What is this?" he asked.
"A stone."
"And what will it be in a thousand years?"
I looked at the stone in my palm, at its rough edges and its unremarkable grey surface. "Still a stone. Perhaps smaller. Perhaps smoother."
He nodded. "The mountain from which it came—what will that be?"
"I don't understand."
"The mountain will still be a mountain," he said. "But the stone may become sand. The sand may become soil. The soil may nourish a flower, and that flower may feed a bee, and that bee may help create a world." He took the stone from my hand and placed it back on the cave floor. "The mountain remains because it must. It has no choice. But the stone can choose to transform, or it can choose to remain a stone forever, clinging to its own immutability while the world moves on around it."
I stared at the stone, understanding beginning to dawn.
"Your grief is the mountain," he said softly. "It will always be there. It must be there. It is the foundation of who you have become. But you are not the mountain, child. You are the stone. And the stone can choose."
"Choose what?" I whispered.
"Choose to let the seasons wear away your sharp edges. Choose to let the weight of your centuries become something other than weight. Grief becomes anger becomes purpose becomes love again. It is the wheel. You cannot step off. You can only choose where to stand."
I stayed in that cave for a week, and on the morning of the last day, I descended the mountain with a lighter step. The grief was still there—it would always be there. But I had stopped polishing it. I had stopped making it my home.
The stone had chosen to transform.
I had nodded then, understanding the words but not yet their full weight. I understood them now, sitting on Apple's lumpy sofa with a cat in my lap and wine on my breath.
The grief of all the empty rooms and unmarked graves—I had carried it for so long that I had forgotten it was not meant to be permanent. I had made myself into a museum, room after room of carefully preserved loss. I had polished the memories until they shone, had visited them again and again, believing that this was honouring them, keeping them alive.
But the sage had been right. It was embalming myself alongside them.
Grief is a season, not a climate. I had made it my climate. I had wrapped myself in it so completely that I could no longer feel where I ended and it began. I had forgotten that grief was meant to move through me, to change, to become something else.
And it had.
It had become anger.
Not the hot, consuming rage of betrayal. Not the bitter resentment of rejection. Something cleaner. Something that burned away the numbness and left behind a sharp, clear purpose.
The stone had chosen to transform.
Grief had become anger.
Anger had become purpose.
And purpose, I knew with a certainty that resonated in the oldest, deepest part of my immortal soul, would become love again.
The wheel was turning.