[Ayame's POV]
I woke up.
It was a peaceful sleep, deeper and longer than I had permitted myself. I designated one hour. It was morning. The sun's warm light cut a bright, sharp square on the dusty floorboards. The light touched my face. It was warm. That warmth is what pulled me from the dark.
I looked to my side from the bed. I saw Lucid. He was sitting on the floor, his back braced against the wall. He was asleep. The little boy was a small, curled shape against his side, also sleeping. There was a trust in that posture, a complete surrender. Lucid's arm was draped around the child, holding him close even in the vulnerability of sleep.
Seeing that scene triggered a sensation within me. A warm, fleeting feeling located in the center of my chest. A cozy, heart-felt sensation for which I have no accurate name. It was not the heat of blood or of a crackling fire. It was softer. A gentle radiance. Since encountering Lucid, it has been the only new feeling to take root in the barren soil of my heart.
Slowly, without conscious intention, the corners of my lips drew upward. A slight smile. It felt weird. Alien on my face. An unfamiliar engagement of muscles. I had never before allowed myself to feel this way. It was odd. But I knew the catalyst was Lucid. It was the sight of him, embodying protection even in a state of rest.
I rose from the bed. I moved with the silence that is my second nature. I crouched down beside him on the floor. I looked at him. I absorbed the details. The way the perpetual mist swirled with the slow rhythm of his breathing. The strong, definite line of his jaw beneath the obscuring veil. The way his large hand rested, a shield, on the boy's small back. My protective instincts surged forward, clean and powerful. *Guard them. Watch them.*
"Good morning," I said. My voice was a quiet thing in the sunlit room.
Lucid twitched. He stirred. His eyes opened behind the mist. He blinked, his gaze focusing on me.
My usually sharp expression softened of its own accord as he woke. Could I grow attached so quickly? The thought arrived, but I dismissed its concern. The feeling was present. I would not deny its existence.
"Morning," Lucid said, his voice rough with the remnants of sleep. He stretched with careful deliberation, mindful of the child leaning against him. "Did you rest well?"
I nodded. "Yes." I paused. The weight of my failed vigilance pressed upon me. "I am sorry."
"Why?"
"I slept more than one hour."
Lucid laughed. It was a soft, genuine sound that seemed to vibrate in the quiet space between us. It caused the warm feeling in my chest to expand, to spread its gentle heat. "It's fine. You needed it. We're all still here."
We prepared to face the day. The boy woke, confused and subdued. We descended the stairs. The innkeeper stood at his counter. He was grumpy and unwelcoming, as he had been since our arrival. His eyes tracked us with that familiar nervous, calculating gleam. Lucid slid a silver coin across the worn wood in payment for the room. The man snatched it up without a word of acknowledgment.
I looked back at Lucid. He was holding the boy's small hand in his own, his grip firm yet gentle.
"Come on, let's find your papa," Lucid said to the child, his voice a low, gentle current.
My face softened again, an involuntary reaction. I took my place just behind them, a silent shadow in their wake.
We moved through the town. The townsfolk we questioned were vague, their answers evasive and unhelpful, as before. But I noted another pattern, a discordant detail. The other travelers. Those I had observed upon our arrival. The elderly woman with the wool shawl. The young couple speaking in hushed tones. The solitary young man traveling alone. Where had they gone? They entered the inn, but I never witnessed their departure. They seemed to have been absorbed by the building's silence, to have vanished into the very walls.
It was suspicious. A red flag in the mundane. But I consciously pushed the observation aside. We were not remaining here another day. The Sky-Dock was not a great distance from this village. I presumed Lucid required resupply or a final rest before the three-day journey to Vex via the Celestial Rails. I have traveled those rails before. Fragments of the memory persist. A vast, silent void tinged with ambient purple light, where motes of cosmic debris and lost stars drift in perpetual stillness. It is... beautiful.
Lucid approached a guard that had spoen to yesterday. Though this was a different one this time, larger, with a detestable face and eyes that of a greedy merchant.
"I have some information about that brat's father," the guard stated, his gaze fixed on Lucid with undisguised avarice. "For a measly one gold coin, I can tell you."
Lucid did not hesitate. He retrieved a small pouch from within his satchel and placed a single gold coin into the guard's waiting, calloused palm. The man's eyes ignited with a greedy light.
I was surprised. Lucid's selflessness with his resources, a child who was nothing to him, continued to be a source of his selflessness. An illogical act.
"Thank you kindly," the guard said, pocketing the coin with practiced speed. "We found a corpse. A man. Devoured by Unfaithful. Not too far from here, in the blue woods. Just yesterday."
The words were delivered like a verdict, blunt and devoid of empathy. He spoke them directly in front of the boy. The child's small face collapsed in on itself covered by his dark messy hair. He gripped Lucid's leg, burying his face in the fabric, his entire small frame trembling like a leaf in a storm.
I could feel it. The boy's loss, a yawning, cold chasm opening where the presence of a parent should be. I understood this feeling. It resonated with a dark, formless ache within my own fragmented memory. I understood it with a familiarity that was almost stabbing.
"Did you attempt to retrieve the body?" Lucid asked. His voice was tightly controlled, a thin layer of ice over a boiling sea. "For a burial, at least?"
The guard snorted, a derisive puff of air. "Nah. Not worth the risk. He wasn't anyone of us. So why should we bother?"
I felt Lucid's anger then. A hot, sharp wave of it emanating from him. It did not manifest on his mist-shrouded face, but I felt it in the sudden tension of the air, in the almost imperceptible stiffening of his posture. The hand resting on the boy's shoulder tightened into a fist for one brief, telling second before he forcibly relaxed it.
"I see," Lucid said, his voice flattening into a polite, empty monotone. "Forgive me for taking so much of your time."
"Piss off, Mist-face," the guard grunted, turning his broad back on us.
My mouth acted without consulting my mind. The words were past my lips before I could arrest them. "Lucid. I can extort him for more informations."
Lucid looked back at me. His hidden gaze found mine through the veil. "No need," he said. But then he leaned closer as if gathering his thoughts, his next words a breath not quite meant for my ears, "I know everything now."
I looked at him, confusion knitting my brows.
"He is not dead," Lucid whispered, the conviction in his voice absolute. "I doubt it."
I wanted to say more to ask more, however at times less is more. So I remained quiet.
We spent more time exploring the town. Lucid vanished for a short while into a small shop, leaving me alone with the boy on the quiet, muddy street. I felt a profound reluctance to interact with the child. I possess no instinct for comfort, no lexicon for soothing. But I felt obligated to try. It seemed expected.
The boy looked up at me. His eyes were swollen and red from weeping, but within them flickered a desperate, fragile hope, the last ember in a cold hearth. "Young miss," he whispered, his voice so small. "Do you think my father is alive?"
"No," I said.
The word was out. Blunt. Unadorned. It was the logical conclusion based on the evidence: the guard's callous story, the town's pervasive secrecy, the vanishing travelers. Honesty is efficient. It kills any false hope with a clean cut.
The boy's face underwent a second, more final collapse. The tiny light in his eyes was snuffed out, replaced by a desolate darkness. His lower lip trembled violently.
Had I spoken incorrectly?
I observed his small, shattered expression. A strange, twisting sensation occurred in my chest. Not physical pain, but something adjacent to it. A recognition of an error. I had applied the ruthless logic of survival to a wound of the heart. The tools did not fit.
I attempted to correct course. The words felt clumsy and foreign in my mouth. "We do not know his fate with certainty. I cannot say for sure." It was a retraction, but a weak and hollow one. The damage was already inflicted, the cut made.
He simply stared at the ground, silent tears carving clean pathways through the grime on his cheeks.
I continued, speaking to his frowned face. "However. You must face loss directly. No matter how grim its visage. That is the way of my people." The words were a recitation from a half-remembered past. A lesson etched not through gentle teaching, but through the hard experience of repeated loss. "Emotions in such a time are useless."
I winced internally as I said it. A sharp, psychic pang. A memory-fragment flickered, a stern voice echoing in a austere stone hall, the ghost of my own younger face set in stubborn defiance, the sting of a rebuke for showing fear. The lesson had been learned, internalized. But voicing it now felt… hypocritical. It felt like a lie.
"Pride, honor, and titles are useless too," I added, the words spoken almost to myself. It was a direct contradiction to the core of my fractured memories told to me by my people. Why did uttering this contradiction hurt? Why did the old, cold lessons now feel like shackles on my spirit?
The boy did not comprehend my internal conflict. He only heard the cold detached hardness of it.
I looked at his small, shaking shoulders. The part of me that had learned to protect Lucid, the part that had kindled that warm feeling upon waking, stirred. It pushed insistently against the rigid, cold training of my past.
I knelt down. The action brought me closer to his eye level. The movement was unfamiliar, my body stiff with disuse in this posture of… what? Comfort? Connection?
"Do not let your emotions take a hold of you," I said, my voice lower, an attempt at a tone that was not a command. It still emerged as one. "You are stronger than your adversaries, so fight till the bitter end."
These were the only approximations of encouragement I could muster. They were not gentle. They were a challenge.
The boy finally lifted his gaze to mine. His face held no gratitude. No comfort was found there. It was filled with a pure, absolute fear of me, of my words, of the harsh, emotionless world I seemed to represent. My blunt truths had not built a bridge of understanding. They had erected a wall of terror. He saw a monster instructing him not to feel.
He took a stumbling step backward, his eyes wide as saucers.
I remained kneeling, frozen. I had tried. I had failed categorically. The warm, fleeting feeling from the morning was gone, extinguished and replaced by this cold, hollow sense of failure. I had protected his physical form by my proximity, but I had lacerated his spirit with my version of truth. I did not know how to accomplish both tasks simultaneously. They seemed to be mutually exclusive, enemies on the same battlefield.
Lucid found us in the middle of the road a moment later: me, a statue of stoic failure on the dusty street; the boy, standing several paces away as if poised to flee from a predator.
I turned. A brief flash of relief and happiness shot through me at the sight of him. This reaction was not in my nature. Why did his presence provoke such a response? I swiftly recomposed my features, forcing them back into the familiar, indifferent mask.
Lucid's gaze traveled from the boy's frightened face to my own rigid, expressionless one. He did not sigh nor look disappointed. He did not utter a word of reproach. He simply walked to the boy and placed a broad, steady hand on his head, ruffling his hair with a gentle, grounding touch.
"It's okay," he said, his voice a soft, unwavering anchor in the child's storm. "We'll figure it out together. Let's get some food, huh? Something warm."
He led the boy away, casting a single glance back at me over his shoulder. It held no anger. It was… understanding. And within it, a quiet, unspoken question.
I stood up slowly slightly... flustered? No it can't be...
The old lessons of my people echoed like ghostly shouts in my memory: *Emotions are a liability. True strength is absolute control of one's psyche. Attachment is vulnerability and loss.*
But as I watched Lucid bend at the waist to listen to the boy's tearful, hiccupping whispers, as I observed the infinite care in his guidance, a new thought crystallized within me, clear and sharp as the broken blade I carried.
Those old lessons were wrong. Or, perhaps more accurately, they were obsolete. Strength was not merely the ability to face catastrophic loss without flinching. It was the capacity to feel the profound weight of that loss, and to consciously choose to protect, to connect, to offer warmth despite it. It was embodied in the inefficient, illogical act of sharing precious resources with a strangers, like that same generous act he had donefor me in the red mountains. It lived in the stubborn, loud-hearted kindness that was Lucid's defining characteristic.
I had given the boy the harsh truth of a merciless world. Lucid was offering him the fragile, necessary truth of hope. I did not know which perspective was ultimately more real. But I knew, with immediate clarity, which one the boy needed in this moment. And with a certainty that settled deep into my mind, I knew which path, which truth, I now wished to understand.