Ever since Elvira Akhmatova could remember, travelers had shared her home.

 

“We Ossetians — friendliest people on planet!” her father would say in thick-accented English to the Western lunatics who’d decided the Wild Nineties were the time to backpack around the Caucasus. He’d adapted to the new decade: before, it had been “friendliest people in USSR” in thick-accented Russian.

Seemingly undisturbed by the violence now rattling neighboring Chechnya, the foreigners gushed over Mount Kazbek’s beauty and fyddzhin pies.

* * *

 

Folk wisdom held that mountain air had this amnesic effect, but Elvira remembered everything. She recalled September 20, 1988 — her eighteenth birthday — like it was yesterday. She was out for wood, Murtaz the Mule trotting beside her. Suddenly, the ground shook. Snow flurried into the air. Elvira froze, scanning the peaks for avalanches.

When she looked down, a man lay in the snow. He wore tight overalls, like a Bolshoi ballet dancer. He wasn’t old, but the frost in his hair and eyebrows made him look like a wise shaman.

 

Elvira’s Russian folktale-fed imagination whispered “Fairy King Morozko”. Her Soviet pragmatism suggested a lost skier. Caucasus wisdom screamed bride kidnapper.

 

“Stay back!” she said, swinging her axe. “If you think I’ll go to your village and be your captive, you’re sorely mistaken!”

 

The man’s violet eyes locked with hers. His entire face burst into laughter, breaking the frost on his eyebrows. “Darling, where I come from I couldn't take you even if I wanted to,” he said.

 

Elvira frowned. “What do you want then?”

 

He rose and took a step toward her. “I’m... a messenger,” he said, his face serious. “You must leave Karmadon before your thirty-second birthday.” A tear streamed down his face, stopping frozen on his cheek as the ground shook again. “I must go. Please, Elvie, promise you’ll get out.”

 

“How—”

 

The mountain grumbled. Snow whirled into the air. Morozko was gone.

 

* * *

 

Since freshman year in the Time Institute, Xander had suspected he’d end up in the same time-topos as Yujin for their Sabbaticals. It made sense — they’d shared a dormpod, first places in class rankings, and for one doomed half-semester, a holo-tattooed not-quite-girlfriend.

 

Still, the coincidence was uncanny. Yujin was a History major. Xander, as Yujin loved reminding him, had sold his soul to the Geosciences department for a Terrenaissance-funded scholarship.

 

“The past is the new frontier,” Yujin ironized Terrenaissance’s slogan. “Excited to pioneer the resource-juicing of our dead mother planet through the space-time continuum?”

 

“Excited to fetishize protonatives and their little folktales nobody cares about?” Xander shot back.

 

Neither truly knew what they were talking about. Despite the terrasimulators, neither was prepared for the sensation of snow against their skin, the smell of pines, or the mountain’s purple-orange hues at sunset.

 

No simulator could’ve prepared them for their host, either. Elvira was a ray of Terran sunshine, babbling faster than their dead language in-brain translators could process.

 

“When Papa, God rest his soul, told me we’d been hosting time-travelers my whole life, it all made sense!” Elvira said. “I always wondered what all those foreigners were doing in the middle of nowhere...”

 

They were on their third serving of “birthday pie” — Elvira was twenty-five today — when she asked them about their Sabbaticals.

 

“I’m tracing a folktale’s origin,” said Yujin. “A mountain faerie was courted by two princes. She couldn’t marry either, for if she left her kingdom, its magic would wither. One prince agreed to be her husband for one day each year, when the gates between their realms opened. The other was jealous, and stole the faerie’s mountain. I believe the legend originated around here-now.”

 

“Fascinating!” Elvira said. “Never heard of it though, and I know the Nart saga by heart.”

 

How could Xander and his boring glacier analyses compete with that? Before long though, it was him Elvira accompanied on every trek, talking and talking, about life, death, magmatic rocks, balalaika music, outer space, donkey-rearing, Boris Yeltsin...

 

* * *

 

Sabbaticals lasted seven years, but they were slipping away like weekdays.

 

“You never wish you time-hopped like Yujin?” Elvira asked Xander one night in 1999, lying on his chest.

 

Once arrived in their time-topos, students were allowed to short-distance-travel up to seven years back and forth, provided they never landed in the same day twice. Yujin had been hopping from 1988 to 2002, chasing his mysterious folktale with some old woman somehow connected to it all. He always visited around Elvira’s birthdays.

 

“Nah,” Xander said. “Glacier’s the same here-now as in 1988.”

 

“You know, I think I met you in 1988. You were older and had purple eyes.”

 

“Possible. Iris-mods are trendy back home.”

 

“You said I should leave Karmadon before my thirty-second birthday.”

 

“Well, the day before that is my last, so please don’t go anywhere,” Xander said, kissing her endlessly.

 

* * *

 

“How could you?” Xander burst into Yujin’s tenured professor office, violet eyes simmering with anger. He shoved a holo-tablet in his face. “Kolka-Karmadon glacier collapse, September 20, 2002? Entire Nizhny Karmadon village buried in ice and debris... You had archives access, you knew! She dies right after we leave, and you didn’t warn her?”

 

“I was waiting for you to get clearance at Terrenaissance so you’d learn the truth,” Yujin said. “Why do you think they pay students to poke around glaciers? They’re smuggling Earth’s water into the future! They caused the collapse, Xander.”

 

“What?”

 

“There’s a local Resistance. Their leader, Feira, contacted me on Earth. That’s why I was always gone.”

 

“B-but Elvira...”

 

“Here.” Yujin handed him his travel wristband. “I have a few minutes of Sabbatical left on September 20, 1988. Go say your goodbyes, then come back and join the fight.”

 

* * *

 

On September 20, 2002, Elvira went out for wood with Murtaz III. The mule bucked as the mountain let out a familiar grumble.

 

An old woman appeared, dusting snow off her overalls. “Come, child,” she said, handing Elvira a wristband. “They’re stealing our mountain. Time for you to join your princes and resist.”

 

“Who are you?” asked Elvira.

 

“I’m you. You’re the legend. We’re Feira.”