The hairs on the back of Flanker's neck were prickling; the watcher was being watched in the dark and he had no way of averting it.
He had been skirting east Mampang by rooftop for nearly an hour now, and all he while he had felt the undeniable presence of someone else, a sixth sense he had cultivated all his life. Only his eyes told him otherwise, giving him no target to aim for, and so he settled for the discomfort of a role reversal.
He paused, assessing the view below. Low-roofed slums, reminiscent of Khare, full of winding alleys where he would be too exposed from above. He had no choice but to move downwards and head for the dreaded spiral that way.
But first, to deal with matters, sight or none. Flanker dropped himself from the rooftops and landed flat on his feet, catlike, his stalker following him with a loud, untrained tumble that betrayed their position entirely. He spun and prepared to unsheathe his blade only to be met with the sudden appearance of a girl, wide-eyed and silent and lying sprawled on the cobblestones.
A child could clearly pose him no threat. He released his stance and took a step away from her, but the panic had already receded from her eyes.
"We don't get people from outside much," she said suddenly, cutting into the quiet. "I saw you skim the outer walls. I wanted to know where you came from."
"That won't be necessary," he replied simply. "My purpose is nothing worth knowing."
Bemusedly, he watched her squirm as if trying to stand, and held out a hand for her to take. She accepted gratefully… and then seemed to promptly flicker out of and back into existence. He squinted in disbelief but the girl simply smiled and began to shake her head, and then flickered once more like a poorly burning candle.
"When I shut my eyes, I disappear," she informed him, in a tone one reserves for mundane things like describing the weather. "And when I open them, I come back."
"That's how you tailed me." He shook his head incredulously. "I must give credit where it's due. I've never known someone to manage that feat before."
They stood for a moment in the cool dark of Mampang. She looked up his masked face with curious wonder and he watched her back, flickering out of sight every few seconds. Somewhere not far away, a tavern bustled. "May I read your palm? I want to practice."
He laughed gently. "My hands are bloody. You don't want to see them."
The girl wrinkled her small nose. "Why, don't you ever wash? Never mind that." She reached out for his hand and he instinctively almost grabbed for his blade once more, but refrained at the last second.
She watched his twitch with interest. "Are you ill? I'm good at herbs, too. I used to live in a bush. They call me Briarpatch."
"I, too, have an affiliation for bushes. I hide in them. So they call me Flanker."
"What do you hide from?"
"The worst things you can imagine."
She broke her hardy eye contact momentarily to flicker a gaze behind him, and he understood exactly why. In High Xamen, fear itself is visible from every place you try and hide.
He gingerly pulled off a glove from the fingertip. "Go, on then. But be quick about it."
"Good!" She clapped her hands almost silently and reached out to take his. Her fingers were oddly warm and so very childlike on cold skin.
"I see…" she squeezed her eyes shut, and her invisibility became sustained rather than erratic again. She reappeared promptly, eyes wide and thoughtful. "Much pain. Broken glass, red blood, a curved blade…." Her eyes trailed to the sword strapped to his hip.
"That sounds very pedestrian to me." But the quip was empty. He should not have exposed a child to his life. She looked haunted.
"No, no, that's not all." She closed her eyes again in concentration and disappeared for a long moment. The only way he knew she hadn't run away to the future and back to fetch his fortune was by the faint warmth of her finger rested on his life line and her steady breath. Or perhaps, he mused, he had finally gone mad. A cheerful invisible clairvoyant girl from the bushes? Any moment now a guard would walk past and see the crazed assassin, standing in an alleyway with his palm outstretched and staring intently at thin air…
"A dance!" She proclaimed, and he nearly leapt away when she burst back into sight. "A dance with blades and then, in a better life, one with pipe music and shaking bookshelves." She giggled and let go of his hand. "How beautiful. I don't know who you are still, Flanker of the bushes, but you must be happy in at least one world."
"I am sure it can't be this one," he replied sullenly.
Her small face scrunched up as she smiled at him again. "Well, you've met me, haven't you? So it must be the most excellent life of them all."
"Perhaps," he murmured, and wondered if anybody had ever seen his smile from his eyes. "Can you see your own future?"
She pursed her lips. "Sometimes. I try to. I can see more clearly with crystals but they're difficult to use… and I don't know if I want to see any more of it." Once again, her eyes drifted towards the tower.
"It seems all of our fates are tied to one place," he confided, her fear making him honest. "And I will head to mine tonight."
"Tonight," she breathed. "That's so soon. You must be so frightened." He tried to interrupt with his regular denial, but she left no room for it, and so kept to her own conclusion. "Good luck to you. But don't go down these alleys. You'll never find your way out. You can go quietly through the square and nobody will care as long as you keep your head down. Go past the statue of the Archmage and then straight North."
"Then I will take the path you lead me down." He nodded to her amicably and gave the Assassin's Guild salute- two fingers slicing across the neck- that she watched with interest and then mirrored. Ten minutes ago, he would have assumed she mimicked it out of naivety, but now it was clear that she knew and embraced the connotation after all. And with that mutual farewell, he slipped back into the shadows, and she vanished into them accordingly.
Years later, when Aliizi learned to bind all her magic into crystals and see what was yet to be in them, she watched her heroine cross blades with the assassin.
So she shut her eyes and wished the future could disappear too.