There’s no tension between us. Two kindred spirits wandering the same wood. The stream murmurs between us—a rare place of communion in a land forgotten to all, save us.
He studies me at last: my tattered cloak, worn boots, the telltale marks of a rough life lived. “What on earth are you doing out here, child?” he asks, voice a blend of curiosity and concern.
I straighten, not in defiance but in quiet pride. “I never belonged there—in the village. When I lost my father…” I pause, more in reflection than grief. “It wasn’t worth staying any longer. It wasn’t safe. Here—” I lift my face to the wind and filtered light “—here, I feel at home.”
I tell him of the forest, my refuge, the ways I’ve learned to survive its moods. In turn, Eryndor confides that he too once sought sanctuary when the place he called home no longer welcomed him.
“Were you cast aside too?” I ask carefully, wondering what could exile a man who had lived for centuries.
“In a way, yes,” he says, then adds, almost tenderly, “but perhaps not for reasons you might think. I left… for love.”
“Love?” The word feels foreign on my tongue. “Why would that force you from the life you’d always known?”
“To call it forbidden might be too strong,” he muses, “but there was no place for her in my world, nor I in hers.”
“A rival court?” I venture, straining to picture what his world might be like.
“Not quite.” His mouth curves faintly. “We sit now in a place between realms—hers, mine, and yours.”
“Mortal?”
He nods. “It’s not unheard of. But those of us who choose to spend a mortal lifetime with the one we love do so knowing we’ll never belong anywhere but with each other. Knowing that loss is inevitable.”
Bittersweet sorrow drifts across his expression. It’s a look I recognize—akin to the one my father wore on the rare occasions when ale loosened his grief enough to speak of my mother. But where my father’s sorrow had been a wound, this man, this immortal, wore his like a shroud.
“I would not trade a moment of it,” he murmurs, more to memory than to me.
As the light shifts again, he regards me with new intent. “We called these woods home once—our peace in a world that had none. Anywhere with her would have been sanctuary.”
Something stirs in me at the warmth threaded through his words. I barely notice my fingertips drifting through the stream, the water moving as though drawn by my touch.
“Decades we lived quietly here. Decades longer I mourned. Our cottage walls grew too cold without her. I can no longer bear to be in the place where we built a life that has been too silent for too long.” His voice fades, then returns, softer. “It would be a shame for it to go to waste—the cottage, I mean. I left it as it was, should another ever need it. You seem a worthy steward, for however long you might have need.”
My breath catches. A cottage—hidden, untouched, mine to tend.
“I couldn’t possibly?—”
“It’s time I move on. I do not know what my path holds, but it’s onthe road ahead, not in the past.” He looks out to the horizon, and I feel a kinship between us. Each leaving the place we once called home, each seeking refuge in the quiet of these woods.
He clears his throat, looking back at me. “I will not return, and you would not be disturbed,” he assures me. “Few know of its existence.” When I stop protesting, he gestures downstream. “Follow the water until the crooked falls, then turn east. Stay the course until the air smells of night jasmine. Then you’ll know you’re near. Just beyond it, you’ll find the place.”
Kindness—pure, unbidden—floods through me, sharp enough to sting. “I don’t know how I could ever repay you.”
He smiles faintly. “I ask nothing in return, only that you pass such grace forward if ever the chance arises.”
We linger for a breath longer before parting. He repeats the directions, ensuring I remember. As I shoulder my pack, he lifts a hand in farewell, and I do the same.
I watch until his figure disappears among the trees, his steps fading into the hush of dusk. The forest feels changed—still wild, yet no longer empty. Somewhere ahead, a glade waits.
For the first time, the wordhomedoesn’t taste like longing.
Chapter Two
As the sun fades and the forest shifts from the hum of daylight to the symphony of evening, I wonder if it has all been a dream. The encounter, the offer—it’s so surreal it hardly seems possible.
Fear presses at the edges of my heart, but I remind myself these woods have never steered me wrong. It has always felt as though an unseen hand guides me here. Even before the forest became my refuge, wandering its glades and hills was my surest path to calm. Life is not easy here, but the true threat has always lingered in the town I left behind.
The flowing water, once amber in the dying sun, turns silver beneath the rising moon. I clutch my cloak tighter as the night air sharpens around me. Reason tells me to be wary: a stranger so deep in the forest, a promise of walls I can call my own. Far more inviting than the cold, unyielding cave that sheltered me, yes—but still, it seems too good to be true. And yet, even with tension coiled in my bones, a quiet peace remains. It blooms the instant I see the crooked falls, just as Eryndor described.
