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If she folded a flower for each person's life that had touched hers, the cathedral would probably overflow with flowers long before she got to the point where she actually remembered much.
Seraphs weren't unchanging and weren't history books full of facts. She remembered a lot of things, true, but not even close to everything. Not even close to a lot, but they were still precious memories, nonetheless.
And seraphs redefined themselves over time.
Or at least she did. It was hard to say how other seraphs defined themselves.
She knew she had lived long before, but could not remember how she came about or what she had done before she went into the service. She could have been born into it, for all she knew, but that wasn't what was important.
It was what came after.
She saw the destruction of the service and the lamentations of both humans and seraphs over the loss of greatness. She saw those that came after look to that time with wonder, but she also those that still lived also look back with a different kind of wonder.
"It makes me glad the future is not certain," one had told her. He had also been in the service and took his duties just as seriously as she had. She had no idea if he was older than her, but it was easier to think he was the same age.
"Without the fall of the throne, I would have never known life could be like this."
At the time she didn't understand what he meant. She was just glad that he, a fellow former holy servant, had found joy in life. It made her wonder what her own joy would be.
Then she met him.
It was a boy. A beautiful, scraggly boy that visited her and taught her so much about life. A boy that grew into a man and then fell to the malevolence of their world. She didn't even get to see what made him turn or when; she found out one day when a Shepherd showed her a faded, slightly burnt, folded flower.
She hadn't seen him since he had lost the ability to see and hear her. She had seen this many times throughout her service and had thought nothing of it at the time; humans lost the ability to see them very easily just as easily as they perished.
There was so much she didn't know. She never knew how he had lived. How he died (except at the Shepherd's hands). She never questioned this before. She didn't understand why this has impacted her so hard before. Maybe she would understand if she had more of an interaction with humans.
So she became a Sub Lord.
She couldn't even remember much of the first Shepherd she came into service for. All she could recall was the constant thought of how strange humans were... and how perhaps Shepherds were not the best method to learn about humanity. She certainly got to see much of it through travel, but Shepherds didn't seem to interact much with humans.
Shepherds were always said to be an odd bunch, but she had very little to compare it to.
It was another age until she decided to work with another Shepherd. Until then, she decided to simply walk with humans as herself. When times became hard, she simply hid herself. (This was why it was hard to find another Seraph that wasn't already interacting with humans. Many of them simply hid in their vessels.)
She learned a lot from this time of drifting. She learned that humans changed their minds about things. She learned that change could bring about malevolence or it could bring about purity. She also learned that seraphs changed as well, which if she thought about it, was obvious. And yet she had never thought about it before. It just was.
She thought that maybe this was the same for humans. Things just were. Even if everything was different from just ten years before, things simply were.
Until a Shepherd proposed to her.
"Please become my Sub Lord!"
This was her favorite memory. He had been talking to her for several days while he had been undergoing the initial training. Their extensive travels had given them a lot in common. At the time, she had no idea why he had asked her to be his Sub Lord when there were other fire seraphs in the city, as seraphs sometimes came to see the new Shepherd's ceremony.
"I want to show you how much of a difference we can make in this world. I want you to be there to see it with me."
Later he would hide his face when she bragged to a young earth seraph about the whole thing, claiming that it was a symptom of youth. (Edna, for her part, had looked like she had swallowed a bug.) Eventually, after many adventures, he had retired and she followed him back to his home village. It was on his deathbed that she promised to do what she could to help change the world after him.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Or it would have been if any of it were ever written down. She served as the Prime Lord many times since then. She didn't always do the best job, but she always tried her best. She took the advice of the High Seraphs to heart. She did her best. Didn't always succeed, but she never stopped trying.
That is, until one of the Shepherds she had walked with committed the greatest sin of all.
Again, she wasn't there to see any of it; he had long since retired and had left to found a new town. She had been on her way to visit him and his family when she found that she couldn't get there. She met Zenrus then.
She found herself doubting what she had done. What she had done wrong. Had she simply been too complacent about the whole thing? Did she never really try? Why had this happened when it seemed like there had been nothing wrong with the previous Shepherd? He had seemed so exemplary.
Perhaps "seemed" was the proper word.
She thought about this for years. In a way this was the slowest time of her life as she thought about the various things that she had never thought of before. She thought about all the different kinds of malevolence that she had seen ever the years and how it could have brought about the world she was seeing now.
It was a world that she would have to protect for her failure.
She would have to do more than try, this time. She would have to be strong enough to withstand all of this and to support the next Shepherd and his friends.
It was at the sanctuary, surrounded by friends of the greatest Shepherd of the ages that she realized she was wrong yet again. It was her regrets that pushed her to succeed where she had failed previously, but it was love that made her take the first step. Her strength of duty had passed long before, leaving only the strength of love.
It was the same love she saw in her youngest Sub Lord and bravest Shepherd as they took their final steps forward. In pain, and in love.
And it hadn't been until she talked to the most independent Shepherd that she ever worked with that she finally realized that she had done this all on her own. That she had been living all this time on her own, without duty. Without guidance. Without contract.
She would finally be able to say what was in her heart and the power to purify would still be there.
And so she did, to the most powerful seraph that there would ever be. This would be her flower to him.