Seventeen years into my life and I finally learn the cruel joke Destiny has decided to play on me. Out of all the horrible things I've faced in my life, I have to admit this might be the one to do me in.
"Why?" I asked the sky, my tears hardly masked in the falling rain.
She doesn't need a hero, a protector, and certainly not a petty thief. Even less now that I've done something that I can never be forgiven for.
She was never supposed to find out. Of course she had known all along I had been in the Thieves Guild, but she was never supposed to know just how far I'd fallen.
"I think it'd be best if you left Brightvale now. Forever." Her words echoed in my head as I slipped out of the gates, hiding my face from the neopets standing guard there.
It seems I had never had a place to belong until she came along. Her smiling, but still disapproving, face greeting me every day as she carried me away to the dungeons. Those long, late-night chats we would share when it had been a hard day. The one time we had danced outside the guard's ball.
How could I be so stupid, to have given her up for the Thieves Guild?
I wonder how betrayed she must have felt as I sat outside of Brightvale that night, reflecting on all of this in my mind. The mud puddles forming in the relentless storm seemed to be the only future for me then.
"You did this?" She asked me again, her voice too sad for me to bear. The memories keep taunting me, making me wonder if it was possible I would ever stop thinking about it.
Then suddenly I'm angry at everything. I'm angry at Brightvale, at Hagan, at the Thieves Guild, but mostly, I'm angry at her. Why does it matter what I did, anyways? She didn't love me before and she doesn't love me now, Destiny's cruel joke, how does it make a difference?
Of course it makes a difference!
I knew that. But at that moment, I didn't care. I didn't care for months, actually. It is so much easier to be angry than sad, to blame others than yourself.
But as I sit here in this dungeon cell, Faerieland falling closer to Neopia every second, and that girl denouncing her trust in me, I can't help but realize how stupid I was. I can't help but realize how much I've missed her these past months. I can't help but realize so many things about me and her that I've never even cared about before.
I guess Destiny is strange like that, creeping up so quietly until it's too late. You're in love with the girl who will never love you back.
And that's Destiny's cruelest joke.