Sometimes I think of my parents, who gave me the name Riviere.
They were very kind people who cherished their only daughter. I remember them smiling at me from my earliest days, telling me that as long as they had me, they didn’t need anything else.
So when it was discovered that I had contracted a very rare disease, they were even more shaken than I was. I remember how they wept and cried. They observed my symptoms time and again, asking if there wasn’t some mistake. But the longer they watched, the more obvious it became that there was something strange going on with my body.
Maybe, my parents thought, some terrible thing had possessed me—and so they promptly took me to the town doctor to treat my newly abnormal body.
“I can’t believe this,” the doctor said, astonished from the moment he saw me.
He was observing the pale, vigorous finger of a young woman just turned fourteen. A finger that had just closed a knife wound almost as soon as it was made.
“As you can see, Doctor…our daughter’s body heals itself unnaturally quickly,” my father said. What illness was this? How could it be cured? For that matter, was it an illness? My parents didn’t know.
“I hate to say this, but I’m at a loss as to what these symptoms might mean,” said the doctor, who was every bit as flummoxed as my parents were. The best he could offer was, “If it doesn’t seem to be doing her any particular harm, maybe we can just leave it be.” I think he might even have said something about being a little envious of my swift recovery. Maybe he was speaking from the heart, as someone who spent every day battling illnesses and injuries, or maybe he was just doing whatever he could to make my parents feel a little better. Either way, hearing the doctor say that there didn’t seem to be a serious problem helped them regain some of their composure. They stopped weeping and crying and started to smile once more.
Eventually, however, it became clear that the doctor’s judgment had been mistaken.
Because though years passed after that, my body remained exactly as it had been when I was fourteen.
The country where we were living at the time was a small place, and rumors about me swiftly spread all through town. Riviere has a disease that keeps her from growing up. Even though she didn’t do anything wrong. Poor girl.
People felt bad for my grieving parents and banded together to find some way to fix me. A doctor tried every manner of medicine on me in hopes of encouraging my growth—all in vain. A scholar studied me from head to toe but couldn’t find anything unusual about my body. A mage gave me magical medicine that he hoped would cure me. But nothing had any effect.
People started visiting me, local citizens and folks from beyond our borders alike. But no matter what anyone tried, I never aged a day over fourteen years.
Nothing helped; nothing changed at all. It was like plunging a sword into a raging sea. We tried everything, then tried it all again, but my symptoms never went away, and all our efforts yielded nothing more substantial than the froth on the waves.
As time went on, fewer and fewer people came to our house. One after another gave up. When my parents finally gave up, too, I was in my midtwenties. The years piled up for the world I lived in, but not for me.
“In the end, we were never able to help you grow into an adult,” my father said with a sigh.
“I’m sorry, Riviere,” my mother wept. “I’m so sorry.”
My parents, who for as long as I could remember had never done anything but smile at me, suddenly always seemed to look careworn and grim. The passing years threw the wrongness of my existence into sharp relief. People stopped looking at me with pity and started looking at me with envy.
“You’re little Riviere? You really are still just a girl! Oh, that I could be like you!”
The older a woman was, the more jealous they appeared of my youth.
“Lucky you, Riviere. I wish I could be a kid forever,” said a friend who had just gotten married and had a child. She was telling me, almost proudly, how hard it was to be an adult.
Even the people who had given everything they had to trying to help me were envious: “Tell me the truth. You don’t really want this to be fixed, do you?”
Maybe I had acquired a heart that healed as quickly as my body, because no matter what anyone said to me, I never seemed to feel saddened or pained by it.
“We’re sorry, Riviere. We’re so sorry…”
That was the one thing that caused me real pain—having to see my parents continually grieve. It was obvious to me that not being able to watch their daughter grow up was agony for them.
I saw that to stay with them would only mean to hurt and upset them further. So I decided to go my own way. “I’m leaving this country,” I told them. When I saw how shocked they were, I added, “I’d like to find some way to help myself this time.”
Even then, they were reluctant. Don’t go, they said, it’s dangerous. Stay at home. They said all kinds of things to me as I packed my bags, but I didn’t so much as nod.
“Have you forgotten?” I asked. “I’m twenty-nine now.”
I added that someone that age should be perfectly able to travel on her own.
I smiled at my parents, who were still worried. They at least agreed to see me off. Deep down, I think they knew—knew that they and I were not living in the same time.
I spent a while traveling around the nearby countries.
“I said I was going to try to find a treatment, so I suppose I should.”
It wouldn’t exactly be convenient looking like I was fourteen years old all my life anyway. I couldn’t go on forever separated from the world around me.
For starters, then, I decided to go to all the hospitals and visit all the mages in the nearby lands. None of those in my own country had been able to help me, but maybe somewhere beyond the borders of my homeland there was someone who knew something about my illness.