Ka’llay clutched a map and finally stepped foot on her origin. It had been about 650 years since she was last here by her village. Years and years of silent hitchhiking had turned her into a traveling machine, and her heart raced at the idea of being home within a day. What would the great-grandchildren of her old friends and sister look like? How much had the village changed? 

She got on a bus from the ferry she took, and it took her a few hours to reach her village. 

Or, at least, where her village used to be. 

As Ka’llay stood in front of the skyscraper, her heart sank, and with it, her shoulders drooped. She should have expected this – during her first visit to the east coast, it was speckled with village, but on her second, a few hundred years later, it had all been replaced by flashing store signs and a never-ending boardwalk. She had assumed her place of death would be preserved - how silly of her.  

The air here is hot and thick, and smells like the exhaust that’s slowly been looming through all of Ka’llay’s travels. 

During her several-century travels, she had first gone on foot, exploring the big continent outside of her little village. One day, she reached a coastline and saw a wooden boat perched in the water. It took her over the ocean and to a new land of cobblestone homes and strange accents. Ka’llay disliked it, and she continued south until she found an expansive forest. But she got bored of it within a few months and kept moving until she was back in the city. It had changed - it was still changing. Black smoke poured from brick tubes out of roofs and big buildings emitted the sound of hammers and machinery at all hours of the day. 

Ka’llay got on another boat, only to find herself on a completely new coast. She fled to the forest and found another village, where she holed up for what was likely a few years, managing to catch on to some of the other tribe’s language as she watched them go about their lives. 
But it couldn’t last, and one day the white people entered the clearing and sacked the village.

Ka’llay needed to go deeper into the forest, where no one would find her. She went north and then east again, got on another boat, watched as the city evolved, and finally, after half a millennium, stood in front of the ruins of her deathplace.  

She walked around the city and watched people converse. It was disheartening - their pale skin, every inch of anything Ka’llay remembered replaced with a new culture. Hot-pink, eyesore colors, and tooth-colored accents under rectangular, sky-high concrete buildings. She still couldn’t breathe with the smell of exhaust and tobacco smoke. Abruptly, Ka’llay turned and ran back towards her home with all the speed of someone who was an esteemed Native American general six centuries ago. 

It took her a full day to find a shovel, but once she had one, Ka’llay ran back to the big building she was buried by and started tearing open the dirt in a frenzy. She uncovered her own bone, then shifted to the left to find her real target – an embroidered shirt, lovingly sewn by her sister for her funeral. She carried the garment all the way to the little museum in a quieter part of the city, setting it gently on the doorstep and ringing the doorbell. Ka’llay’s heart leapt when the door opened, revealing a face she intimately recognized.  

It had been morphed into something very different over the generations, but the man’s face carried remnants of her sister.  
He reached down to pick up the shirt, his eyes going wide. “Regalia,” his hands shook as he examined the threads, and Ka’llay felt the fabric of the universe thin. She watched her sister’s great-great-great grandson examine the piece of culture lost from the city as she passed on.