When someone lives as long as a danovus, memories become increasingly fainter as the years go by, and those that do not disappear into the darkness of the past, begin to merge. Time is not important to danovuses, in fact, the older they get, the less they know what to do with it. Physalis Alkekengi completely agreed with this view of life.
She has almost no memory of the beginning of her life. She does not know where she was born, nor what she did in her early years. She would not be able to tell what happened back then even if someone tortured her for the information. Even if everything was not lost, it was more like feelings, impressions, nothing else. There was security, happiness, and then sadness, terror, anger and madness.
When Alkekengi concentrated on her memories, the next things that came to mind were certain scenes from her life. A face, mountains, rivers, caves, sounds, smells, the softness of the grass. However, she was not certain for a long time now if any of the faces from that time would be her family. They were all familiar, she did not feel that any of them posed a danger to her.
However, this did not mean that a sense of belonging had filled her heart. She clearly remembered the glances, the way they whispered next to her. Eventually, the memories began to clear up. At that period, she could already pinpoint which face belonged to whom and what kind of relationship that person had and had with her. She knew why they didn't like her, who had a problem with her being a woman, who had a problem with the fact that she dared to raise her voice, and who had a problem with how enthusiastic she was.
Although she was part of a family with quotation marks, she still stood outside the circle of the others. Among this group of danovuses, a woman's only job was to stand silently next to a man and nod, to be pretty and charming. It was forbidden to speak, and it was not even heard of that a woman had thoughts. In such a community, it was no wonder that Physalis Alkekengi was considered strange and out of place, she who broke the nose of any man who dared to speak to her, who was constantly tinkering with something and seeking new wonders.
One of the danovus woman's fondest memories also comes from this time. A memory that, if she may say so, was among her sharpest. Even today she can recall exactly how her hands moved in that small, secluded forge, how the iron glowed under the hammer, how she carved the runes into the heads of the nails. How the red iron turned into a gray piece of metal. She remembers that her face almost hurt from the wide grin that rested on her face as she took those five seemingly harmless nails in her hands.
Those were just the first attempts, still far from perfect, when she tried them they broke into the unfortunate man who thought he would be the one to try to fix Physalis. If the danovus lady was honest, she no longer remembered exactly how she had refined those particular nails, that wasn't really the point. Finally, she had a defense against those beasts who looked down on her and thought she was weak.
Back then, she still thought that there was no situation in which she would decide to lay her head down for a long sleep. She still thought that the world was out there beyond the island in the distance. So it is no wonder that at the first opportunity, when a foreign ship landed on the island of the danovuses, Physalis immediately jumped at the opportunity and left the place that she had long since ceased to consider her home.
At first, the new land seemed truly exciting, everything was unknown, the smells, the colors, even the sounds did not match the sounds of the island. However, the novelty soon lost the power with which it holds the mind of all sentient beings in its grip. The taste of blood, necessary for survival, was no longer as sweet as before, the days became boring.
Although she later said that she decided that it was foolish to stay awake in a stagnant world and that is why she decided to sleep in a cave in the Karrabata Mountains, the truth was far from that. In fact, she only went to sleep one night and did not wake up the next day, and then the next, and finally she had been asleep for a hundred years when he opened her eyes again. The once empty valley between the mountains was now filled with humans and danovuses. However, curiosity did not awaken in the danovus woman, so after a meal she went back to sleep.
The sleeping cycles repeated themselves slowly and it is possible that Physalis Alkekengi would have fallen into the mistake that the great elders of the danovus race sometimes make, never to wake up again. At that time, the transparents usually appeared around the danovuses to transfer their souls to the Shadow World. However, the danovus woman was saved from final death by a fateful encounter, as they say.
She was not lying when she said that the woman at that time only thought of young Tele Teveli as a light dinner. Not even in her wildest dreams did she think that something like what happened would ever happen to her. She didn't know what the consequences would be if a hegin in the middle of summoning a ghost bond wounded her.
Her first reaction was of course quite extreme. She tried to finish off the hegin, as she had done with most men who had harmed her. However, she didn't expect that when she inflicted the first wound to the hegin, it would also cause pain to herself. Luckily, however, the hegin, whose name she learned after a grumbling introduction was Tele Teveli, liked the situation about as much as she did, so he quickly left the danovus lady alone.
Alkekengi thought that was all it would take, and went back to sleep, but unlike the previous occasions, she only slept for months. The reason for her awakening was Tele Teveli, who shouted her name, and the woman's body, as if it didn't want to obey her, went to the hegin on its own. It was then that she learned what it meant to be on one side of a ghost bond.
Fortunately, Tele Teveli didn't make her appear as much as most hegins did with the ghosts bound to them. However, this didn't mean that the danovus ignored the man as often as she claimed. Physalis often found herself, when she couldn't sleep, no matter how hard she tried, visiting the hegin and watching him for hours.
Then, when Tele Teveli moved beyond the Karrabata and stayed in that small village, the world became boring again, and so the danovus lady fell asleep again. And from this sleep, Teveli's voice woke her up again, calling Physalis Alkekengi, who was fleeing the shadows of the past and oblivion, to another chapter in her life that promised to be much more interesting than the previous ones.