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Yet it seems there’s always an exception to everything. The rustling leaves that muffled her wheezing breaths, the billowing wind that sent his empty sleeve loosely fluttering. They stayed corporeal, nearly physical… vivid enough that I felt like a complete stranger intruding in on the moment.

Really though, what a peculiar memory to choose to suddenly start subverting expectations… and now of all times too.

“Dying,” I heard Liamel say, the shock missing in his expression blatant in his tone. “You are?”

“Yes,” Adalia replied with an impatience without strength. “Now, hurry and offer me your aid. Help me as you’ve boldly declared. Go on then,” She heaved again. “Save my life for me.”

“I… but, how-how can that be?” He sputtered, confusion and distress melded into one forwarding step, the thud of his cane. “When you first arrived here, I saw you—you were healthy. And for so long, I’ve watched you. I know you’ve never once left the village, and even if you had, diseases in Astra are easily treated. So how have you…? I’m afraid I do not understand.”

“I will not explain it. There is no use in explaining it—all you must know is that I am unwell and I am dying. Provide me a solution, otherwise, leave… I am not in the mood for conversation.”

“But if I do not know what you have, then how am I supposed to…?”

.....

Then you should not have asked,” She dropped her gaze from his. “As if it would even make a sliver of a difference. I have sought individuals with great power and knowledge. Against them, what do you hope to accomplish? If even they cannot help me with all their omnipotence, then, truly, how do you, on your own, expect to…!”

Adalia suddenly snapped to hunch, grunting painfully, clutching at her chest with a balled fist against the grass to keep from collapsing to the ground… for a brief moment, she focused on reclaiming her composure.

When the pain had finally chosen to subside, it seemed so had the last remnants of her spirit. She hugged her legs, slumping her head lightly onto her knees as Liamel just uselessly watched as she continued huddling herself into a large, misshapen ball of gloom.

“Forget it,” She told him, her voice muffled against pressing limbs. “Just go. Please just go. I want to be alone now.”

Yet against her request, Liamel didn’t even draw a single inch away from his spot. He looked lost—I would have been lost; told as he has been. I probably wouldn’t know right away what I should do next. Like him, I would have just stood there… pressured yet stagnated by her overwhelming sense of despair.

It happened again. I wanted to just run and lunge at her. After processing it all, that’s the first thing I would have done. Ignore her, embrace her, I couldn’t help it, even if I was just hugging air, a memory—it was just an impulse for me. If I loved her, I’d have moved.

But I couldn’t move, I knew I shouldn’t move no matter how deep the urge was for me. Instead though, as slow and inelegant as ever, I saw Liamel take another small step toward her.

I watched as his lanky silhouette awkwardly crept inch by inch trying and failing to be subtle as possible. Adalia stayed unresponsive, and he grew ever more daring until the shade of his shadow loomed close over her.

“May I?” He asked, pointing the tip of his stick to the empty patch of grass next to her. She didn’t look up, she didn’t answer—probably didn’t care, and taking her silence for the best, Liamel clumsily lowered himself against the tree beside her, spreading his legs out, and laying his cane down beneath the flattened gap of his empty sleeve. “Thank you.”

The silent rustle of the branches was the only thing that spoke back to him—he took it as another positive. He looked relaxed, or at the very least he didn’t look stiff as a bone sitting beside her. If anything, he was rather chirpy all things considered.

“You know, Adalia,” He spoke after a while, his head tilting slightly at her in a glance. “You’re quite mean.”

No response.

“But at least now I know the reason; I’ve always wondered why,” Liamel continued when she remained inert. “There’s a lot I’ve always wondered about you, and I had my assumptions. But dying—well, I suppose that answers a lot of mysteries regarding you.”

Calm and casual came his cadence, which wasn’t what I expected given the context of the situation… as if death was just as bad a setback as tripping over a stray pebble.

“Believe it or not, I thought you’d be the most popular woman in the village when you first arrived here—and in some ways, perhaps you still are. You have this air about you that compels people your way. Ah, I remember the first few days too. All the locals, the men in particular, all day long coming up to your doorstep to make your acquaintance. Do you remember that? Amusing as it was at the time, I sorely regret not having introduced myself to you then. From what I’ve gathered, as discourteous as you remained back then, you were a lot more tolerant, or so I’ve heard. Maybe we could have been friends. I’d like that. Though I suppose that’s quite too late of us now, isn’t it?”

A one-sided conversation seemed to be the only thing ahead of him with the way things were going. If not for Adalia being right there in front of me, I’d have been convinced the man had some imaginary friends.

“When I first knocked on your door, you were already ill by then, weren’t you? The moment I saw you then, I knew something was amiss, I just never… and I suppose my requesting you to pay your due did not help lift matters, did it? You were just as mean to me as you had been now, and with every other instance since, that anger of yours did not abate. Your words were harsher, your behavior colder… and every time I’d catch a look at you, your eyes seemed filled with so much spite at everything. As if the whole world had wronged you—and apparently it has. Looking back now, I realized, you weren’t just angry, weren’t you?”

He glanced again at her, an infinite kindness, an infinite understanding—their inky silhouettes so close to one another that they looked almost one and the same.

“You were afraid too.”

“Stop that,” Adalia suddenly spoke up, lifting her head an inch at him, startling both him and I. “You’ve barely talked to me barely, and you have the gall to think that that means you understand me completely?”

“Not everything, certainly not everything. I wish, regrettably, I wish I do know you,” Liamel said, unfazed. “But, much like you, I know what it’s like to be afraid… to feel so much anger that you cannot help but resent everything you see… and to feel yourself so powerless to do anything… I know what that’s like too.”

She coughed once, though that might have just been a scoff.

“So now you empathize?”

“I do,” He said matter-of-factly. “As well as with that urge to abandon all forms of sympathy others have for you, I can empathize with that too. I’ve watched countless numbers of my peers find reverence, and respect, and purpose in the one thing that is able to give our lives any sort of meaning—the one thing I am completely incapable of doing. To be relegated as this, an errand boy, ostracized by the people I know, ridiculed by the people I don’t. My adolescence was anything but kind, and so in turn… neither was I for a while.”

“And there lies the end of our similarities,” Adalia lifted her head a little higher, the black swirl of her expression nearly reminiscent of a leer. “You’re not the one that’s dying.”

“True, but… is it really that far of a stretch for me to have wished I was? It’s as you said, it’s as everyone had told me—I am weak, useless, I should never have been born. I lost count how many times I am told that before eventually it is all that I have known of myself. To realize that my greatest accomplishment in life would have been never having existed at all.”

“Then if you are so unwelcomed, so unwanted,” Adalia panted. “Why are you even alive in the first place?”

“Because I was wanted. I was loved. My mother loved me, you see and she… she was a fierce warrior, the very best, and perhaps only equaled in prowess by my father. He, well, he didn’t care for me as much. He had left my mother the very moment she declared to him that she would be keeping me. It was she that raised me, only she that supported me. From the very beginning, she knew I was not made for combat, so I was never taught, only cared for. I resented her for that.”

It was at this point that Adalia chose to hold back her tongue. Whether it was due to her fatigue, or something else entirely… either way, Liamel had full compliance to continue with his tale.

And continue he did.