The sun was harsh and the heat suffocating on the first day she was born. She could not remember it, of course, but that was perhaps why Lyssa would always love the cool wind so much.

Growing up, her family had little in the way of possessions. Father worked in the deep mines, barely having a word to say whenever he returned, cloaked in soot and grime, to the hovel they called home. Mother smelled of factory smoke. In the evenings, she taught Lyssa how to read and write and count, if — and only if — all house chores had been completed to whatever arbitrary standard of perfection she had chosen to enforce for the day.

A smile was not something that ever graced their faces and no laughter ever escaped their lips. There was an undertone of misery in that house, clinging to the walls, the sparse furniture, the people. The only one who seemed untouched by it all was Lyssa’s older brother. Always pristine and proper, he was allowed to go to school in an enviable blue uniform that she had to wash and put up to dry on the weekends.

Lyssa felt this injustice as a knife through the heart.

“Just do as you are told,” ordered her father in his raucous voice, not bothering to look her way. Once, twice, a thousand times he said it, as if he knew no other words.

What have I done, what great crime have I committed, to be looked down upon, confined and slaving away for others’ sake? As a child, whenever she could get away from chores and mothering her younger siblings, she would sit and question and work herself into a rage. Time and understanding only twisted the knife more and more. Father rarely noticed her. Mother had only harsh words to offer and harsher work to delegate. Her older brother would smugly remind her of her place in any way he could.

“A girl should smile agreeably and hold her words,” he often said, infuriating in his confidence, as if he had spoken a great truth.

Lyssa sometimes thought of running away, but what place was there for a woman to run? Existence was her prison. The bars were made from her own flesh. She hated it: her life, the world. Her anger faded over the years, but hate grew only thicker, strangling the air out of her, until she felt as if she was but a walking corpse, already rotting and decaying and gone.

Lyssa did not know then what she was capable of. Still, the wish spilled from her heart, unseen yet strong enough to bring the world to heel.

It began with the wind. Whistling, then howling, gales erupted from north, south, east and west, beckoning a storm. Rain fell in waterfalls from every mountain and every roof, gathering below in whirlpools that drowned any screams. Hail cut through bone like steel shards. Roads became rivers and graves of mud. Soon, lightning seared the sky and the earth below shook, cracking spread across the ground like branches from a tree, splitting it open to pull whole buildings down into the abyss.

There had been no time to plead or pray. By the time Lyssa, too, closed her eyes, few voices could be heard at all.

Seven hundred years or so had gone by when Lyssa was born again.

The world was simpler now. She realized — as soon as her rather unproductive time of being once more an infant was done — that many a thing was missing in this era. Busy cities had given way to agrarian villages. There were no industrial towers spewing copious amounts of dark smoke into the air or gaslight lamps lining the streets. Luxuries and comforts had apparently been lost to time as well, but as Lyssa had never known them, she had no way to miss them.

Words were different. Customs had changed. Here and there, Lyssa recognized a trace of old traditions, but it was so vague, so diluted or distorted, that it might as well not have been there at all.

Life was not easy, but neither was it unpleasant. Lyssa’s new parents were kind. They packed her lunch in a bag with little embroidered flowers before she went to school in the morning, asked about her day when she returned home at noon, offered her sugar cookies when she had been especially well-behaved. Even her siblings gave Lyssa no real reason to complain, at most bickering amongst themselves or trying to avoid helping out in the fields in the afternoons.

“That was your task to do today,” claimed her younger sister sometimes, knowing perfectly well it wasn’t so, and Lyssa had to drag her out by the hand.

More than anything, however, she was happy to attend school. Now, no one looked down on her as a silly girl for wanting to learn. Now, teachers praised her when she wrote properly on the blackboard or remembered the formula for calculating the area of a triangle. They even let her borrow books to read at home, which she flipped through at bedtime until the candle at her side burned out.

There were many stories in those books, but the ones about the great cataclysm of days past amused Lyssa the most. Some started eerily accurate in their details, painting the picture of a catastrophe that matched her memories, only to then veer into fantasy; others were entertaining nonsense from start to finish. Attempted explanations were a rich field on their own: from divine punishment to poorly thought of scientific claims, almost every possible cause was covered. None so pedestrian, however, as a young girl wishing for a better life.

“You must help your father bring the produce to the village beyond the river,” her mother told her one day. Lyssa was an adult then, hardy from a life of field work and clever and quick-witted. She pinned her braided hair beneath a colorful scarf and left to help father load the cart.

The way to the next village was short, but the locals were not too welcoming, all of them staring at Lyssa and her father with faces pinched in disgust. An old woman spat at the ground, a child threw a rock that narrowly missed their cart.

“Why do they dislike us so?” Lyssa looked around as they reached their destination, earning glares from anyone who met her eye.

Such a question got her only a string of muttered unkindnesses that her father spoke under his breath. It made clear that the dislike between neighbours was mutual, though, as Lyssa concluded, utterly pointless.

The produce buyer seemed to be of the same mind. He was a middle-aged man with a benevolent manner, who greeted her warmly and gave her father an affable pat on the back, which was tolerated only through gritted teeth. He tried to wave away Lyssa’s offer to help unload the cart, instead pushing her to rest as he called on his wife and son for the job. Both of them greeted the visitors with the same good-natured congeniality. The wife was a fast worker, a smile etched on her face, while the son was a young man the same age as Lyssa, with bright eyes and a resounding laugh. He talked to her as if she were an old friend; by the time the work was done, she might as well have known him all her life.

Lyssa could not help being fascinated. Over the following months, she returned to visit him again and again. They were friends, then lovers. Ordinary days had never felt so much like a gift. Love brightened Lyssa’s features, had her smiling sweetly like never before, made her believe, more than ever, in the righteousness of this new world.

When they decided to wed, they asked his parents for their blessing, then hers.

“Absolutely not!” Mother cried in horror, before launching into a half-murmured rant to no one in particular, alternatively blaming her daughter’s folly and herself for turning a blind eye to it.

“You need to leave,” Father snarled at Lyssa’s intended. He further pushed his point across by grabbing his pitchfork and brandishing it like a weapon at the young man. The conversation broke down into shouts, all meaning lost as all voices were raised above each other. There was a push and pull, all of them forgetting themselves in the moment, and then—

Lyssa’s scream tore through the air.

Struck in the middle of the struggle, her lover stumbled and fell to the floor with a gasp, four open wounds pouring a stream of blood down his chest. Lyssa tried to catch him. His eyes found hers; he opened his mouth, but only a strangled sound came out. She broke down in tears, in hushed soothing words that made no sense, in pleas unanswered. Behind them, the house had devolved into chaos, but all of it was now too far away for Lyssa to hear.

Out of place, out of time, a memory flashed behind her eyes. She remembered the words of her first mother when she taught her to write. They had been sitting at the kitchen table by a dying oil lamp, holding little stumps of charcoal to draw letters on a piece of cardboard.

“Do it again,” Mother said.

Lyssa had looked down at the letters she had to copy and then at the deformed, squiggly lines of her attempt, and asked, “How many more times?”

“Until you get it right.”

Now, holding onto her beloved as his eyes glazed over and his body grew cold, red soaking through her clothes and pooling around them along with her shattered hopes for this world, Lyssa strenghtned her resolve. She lovingly stroked her lover’s hair, her own fluttering about as the breeze grew into a gust, and smiled.

“Shall we try again?”