"That sounds like him," Ludwig said. "Dying and still finding a way to become flammable."
Lorina smiled.
The inner elevator finally reached the upper sanctum.
The leaf opened onto the place where the pond of longevity rested.
Ludwig remembered the chamber well. The great roots. The sacred stillness. The pool whose water shimmered with dense life. The old horror of seeing Lorina's mother bound by the tree, petrified and sustained at the same time, fed by the World Tree and feeding it back in an endless exchange born from Envy's theft.
But the roots that had once coiled and wrapped around Lorina's mother were gone.
In their place, a woman sat on a chair beside the pond.
She was an elf.
That much was obvious.
Yet she was different from every elf Ludwig had seen.
She looked old.
