Oza: still here? Still here.

The Ephemara are all women, and they live about fourteen years. Their sun hangs low and never sets. Oza is the language they speak every day.

The word for "I" is Oza. It also means a flash of light.

They believe in perfect copying, and their academy froze the spelling generations ago. A generation lasts about ten years, though, and speech kept moving: endings dropped, sounds shifted. So the written word is longer than the spoken one. Thesis is spelled pelozu and said pelos. Sun is spelled hosu and said hos. Formal speech reads every letter aloud. Everyone else talks like a teenager.

Because everyone else is one.

Tense is measured from your own life. Telak is what happened in my lifetime, telamo is before I was born, telaze is after I am gone. With fourteen years, the line between what you lived and what you were told is never far away.

So goodbye is telaze. May you still be here, after me.

And every day, two words.

"Tela?"

"Telan."

Still here? Still here.

The video runs 3:59 and ends on a funeral toast, read in the formal voice with every frozen ending spoken aloud.