forever searching, never right
I am lost in oceans of night
forever hoping I can find
memories, those memories I left behind
The day Derris-Kharlan drifts out of range is the day Yuan realizes, too late, that the world has left him behind.
Perhaps that's why he chooses to stay here, where time is less relevant, on the pretense of guarding me. Yet the years still fly by, marked only by visits from some of the Heroes of Regeneration. Yuan is civil to them, and his well-wishes are earnest ones, but he still prefers not to talk to them for long.
They don't have much to say, anyway. They usually inquire about my condition, or else update him on the goings-on around the worlds they united. Occasionally, they may try to talk of their personal lives, although his half-genuine disinterest usually dissuades them.
Nonetheless, Yuan offers them his four-room home, giving them a place to spend the night after they commune with me. Often, he does not return to the house until long after his guests leave it the next day. He prefers to observe only from a distance as the Heroes speak to me in twilit reverie.
I am yet too weak to manifest physically for longer than a few fleeting moments, but though I sleep in the ethereal realm of all spiritkind, I dream of all the Giant Tree perceives and more. The Heroes are close enough in spirit for me to sense their thoughts and feel their actions.
And I can see that one of them, Raine, comes to visit Yuan as well as me.
Her visits are no more frequent than any of the others', but every time she comes, she asks Yuan to tell her of the Kharlan War. Every time, he refuses. And every time, when he vanishes into the dusk and leaves his house to the Heroes, Raine follows him. Because she's curious, because she has more questions than history books can answer, because Yuan's hospitality is admittedly uncharacteristic in its selflessness—a stark contrast to his apathetic demeanor and his habit of vanishing.
Raine's pursuit becomes a slow and dignified game of hide-and-seek, lasting late into the night over the course of several years' worth of visits. Having led the Regenades for centuries, Yuan is excellent at concealing himself… but one night, she finally finds him. He's little more than a shadow flitting through the darkness, moving like a breeze through the leaves, but he's close enough for an observant half-elf like Raine to feel the pull of mana in his blood.
Yuan realizes he's caught when their eyes lock in the starlight. Though there is time for him to run, he accepts his defeat with a resigned sigh, intrigued despite himself. Raine already asks him enough impossible questions during the daylight hours. What more can she want with him now?
"Why do you always follow me?" asks Yuan crossly, folding his arms as she approaches carefully, cautiously. "You should be asleep, like your friends, or you'll be too exhausted to leave on time." His voice sounds a little more impatient than he feels, but he has learned by now that exaggerating his disapproval achieves results more quickly. Snapping is second nature to him.
But Raine only heaves a sigh, immune to his subtle intimidation. She has come to expect this attitude from him. "Why do you offer us your house if you don't want us to stay there?" she counters, searching his face. "Why force yourself out of your own home on our account? There's room enough for more than just the four of us." She asks primarily out of curiosity, but she knows as soon as the words leave her lips that Yuan will take them as a challenge.
"I like being alone," he retorts, glowering at Raine with all the righteous ferocity of the angel he used to be. "And I'm hardly evicting myself from my own house, least of all for any of you. It's just that Martel told me…" Yuan stops himself abruptly before he can repeat what his fiancée once said to him. That if she ever had a real house of her own, she'd never turn down a traveler in need, because she'd never forget what it was like to wander the world. (Neither will Yuan.)
Still, he inadvertently tells Raine more with that fragment than he has in years full of evasive explanations. "I see," says Raine, smiling faintly. It seems that love can make a heart beat to a different rhythm after all. This must be what he's afraid of, all those times he shuts her down. Yuan can't bring himself to speak of all he's lost, even though he still thinks about what she would want him to do or say or think after thousands of years.
Raine knows better than most the hold of the past on the present: subtle semi-conscious quirks, little daily tributes to moments and places and people gone by. "Then I'll let you be alone," she says eventually, and though she places no special emphasis on the last word, Yuan hears it anyway. "Good night, Yuan."
Her voice softens to a sympathetic murmur, and Yuan frowns as Raine turns and disappears into the darkness. She likes being alone too, after all, and she is young enough that she can still discern the difference between solitude and isolation. But Raine does not return to explain the distinction. She sees right through the lies Yuan tells himself, and she doesn't even need to say so for him to start second-guessing them.
Though her visits continue as usual over the years, she does not seek him out again. Yet from time to time, as if surfacing from a dream, Yuan recalls what it felt like to understand and to be understood in the space between words, in a brief meeting of like minds in the unlikeliest time and place. And, if only for a moment, he almost wishes she would.