Her fingers ran over the worry beads. Supposedly, counting them would calm her mind. One, two, three, four... They were lovely, a russet coral color, the long string winding around her throat several times, loops cascading over her body, the lowest hoops flicked back and forth by her tail as she treaded water. One hundred eighty six, one hundred eighty seven, one hundred eighty eight... They had been a gift, and a kind one at that, to salve her worries in this time when they were too many. She should have followed Galina to Etlan Shiis, that would have been safer than staying with her father here in chill Vodalia. One thousand three hundred sixty three, one thousand three hundred sixty four, one thousand three hundred sixty five... Even the advantages worried her – her father had possibly damned them for promotion to kingship, and of what? Once the capital of the empire, a post second only to the Empress herself, but now the city behind her was empty of all but the old, the sick, the desperate, and the mad. Those who could not journey through the portal, or who would not for their pride. Thirteen thousand six hundred forty nine, Thirteen thousand six hundred fifty, Thirteen thousand six hundred fifty one... And now she, a princess of Vodalia however recently granted such rank, had to keep watch from the outer wall for the approach of their enemy. The Homarids would come, whether they were senseless brutes like her father said or beings of terrible alien intelligence as she feared, they would come, swimming on the icy currents, scuttling across the sea floor, a tide of shells and pinchers against which Vodalia had won no lasting victory. And now those who remained were so few that their princess kept watch at the outer wall for the moment she would call on Svyelun's pearl light to shine through the beacon and call her father's warriors and mages to battle. Two hundred sixty four thousand three hundred thirty seven... so many worries! So long this watch! So lonely! One hundred thirty eight bill... Something there! No, her eyes were playing tricks on her. One... One... One? How many? She had lost count. Her fingers ran over the beads again. Such a kind gift from a stranger, and how strange a stranger at that, an air-breather come down to her father's court. One, two, three, four...

About her spread an ancient desolation, many-columned Old Vodalia in fallen blocks along the sea floor behind her gaze, and before it the lonely mud of an abyssal plain unpeopled since unfathomable antiquity. The highest barnacle-crusted rubble was the very tower in which she floated, the steady current of her flicking tail having long worn away the stone behind but left the facade before her view. In that view it was still the eve of apocalypse, but it had come and gone, and others besides – the Homarids, who tore down that city of their rivals however late they came for its true mistress, had let her be, too frightened by her senseless mouthing of the counting of beads. Ice had crusted over the waves above, then after an age of holding land and sea in thrall broken apart and melted into nothing at last. The Phyrexians had not noticed her, floating silent in her place of no strategic import, Karona's coming and going in distant Otaria had not earned her notice even as mana itself reeled from the enormity of events, and even when the time rifts opened before her eyes a second view of the Homarid armies approaching Vodalia long ago, she had not seen them, and for the second time failed to light the alarm.

She did not shake from her nervous, impossible, immortal vigil even when the land-walker who had given her the worry beads returned. He floated before her, swam around her, surveyed the stately wreckage of the surroundings. He watched her fingers play over the beads, locked gaze with her intent yet vacant forward stare, read the words that silently crossed her lips, committed to perfect memory the beauty of her being and especially the tragedy of her failure. As he made ready to leave, Æther trembling around him, she almost saw him. Her eyes focused, just for a second, the agitated movement of her fingers stopped cold, her lips pursed, no longer mouthing a count that had not paused for more than four millennia. He waited, and then the moment passed. She fingered the beads, and began to mouth numbers again, that ageless prayer for some relief from her worries. It seemed she had lost her count, though, and was starting again from 'one'. There it was, that one touch that made it worth his while. For Raiker Venn, the Multiverse's greatest poet, north of four thousand years was not too long to wait for the perfect subject. He planeswalked away, to a drier place where he might compose what he had seen.

Again the cold seas were lonely, flowing by as heedless of her as she was of them. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen...