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"Anywhere" -- Chapter 7: The Reason
By The Last Princess of Hyrule
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"I'm not a perfect person,
I never meant to do those things to you,
And so I have to say before I go,
That I just want you to know,
I found a reason for me,
To change who I used to be,
A reason to start over new,
And the reason is you,
I've found a reason to show,
A side of me you didn't know,
A reason for all that I do,
And the reason is you . . ."
-Hoobastank, "The Reason"
-x-X-x-X-x-
Hitomi woke late in the morning a week and a half later to luxurious sunrays beaming through the open window, warming her face. Gradually, she opened her eyes and looked around with satisfaction. The room at the White-Winged Dragon was finally beginning to feel homely and pleasant. It was warm, comfortable, and most of all, clean.
Along with giving Hitomi free range of any cooking and cleaning supplies she could find, the innkeeper had provided her with a few more blankets to make up a second bed on the floor by the wall. Folken had offered to sleep there the first night and, for all Hitomi's insistence, could not be swayed to trade with her in any night that followed.
As she sat up, Hitomi noticed Folken had already risen and gone somewhere. She knew he was preparing to return to Asturia, though she wasn't sure when. They had never formally discussed it, but there was mutual understanding that he would have to leave someday once Hitomi was settled in Tenue.
The innkeeper offered Hitomi her room at the inn as a permanent lodging for a good price, and as a source of income, he gave her work. She cooked and cleaned with the other servants for decent wages. It was a good start until she could find something better.
All of this was settled four days ago, and Hitomi was starting to wonder why Folken still hadn't left. There was little preparation needed for returning to Asturia. He easily could at any time, and yet he lingered. It didn't bother Hitomi--she enjoyed having company--but she was curious what made him stay.
A sudden knock at the door brought Hitomi rudely from her musings, and with a frustrated groan, she got up. Yawning and rubbing her eyes, she opened the door.
Standing in the corridor was a woman Hitomi had never seen before. She looked to be in her early forties, with long, dark brown hair and hazel eyes. Her dress was made of fine-spun green linen, and Hitomi could tell by its style that the woman lived in comfort.
The woman dipped forward in a respectful bow. "I beg your pardon, but is this the home of the Lady Hitomi?"
"Yes, but she's not in," Hitomi lied automatically. She started to close the door, but the woman stuck a foot forcefully in the doorway and held it open.
"Please, I must speak to her," she said.
"I told you, the lady isn't in," Hitomi insisted.
"Could I perhaps wait inside for her? It is urgent that I see her."
"She won't be back for a few hours." Hitomi pushed on the door, hoping it would send a message to the woman to move out of the way.
The woman ignored it. "I'm willing to wait."
Hitomi started to wonder if the woman actually did have something important to tell her, but she didn't reveal herself. For some strange reason, people had been showing up unexpectedly at her door over the past nine days to ask Hitomi to bring their deceased loved ones back to life. One of the only ways to deter them was to lie that she wasn't really the Lady Hitomi.
It wasn't long before Hitomi lost her patience with the whole thing. Time and again, she told her visitors that she wouldn't resurrect anyone, not even for the bags of gidaru they offered her, but they persisted. Eventually Hitomi got so sick of dealing with them that she drew up a sign and hung it on her door, lying that, contrary to whatever anyone had heard, she did not have the power to resurrect the dead. Needless to say, it didn't work.
Actually, Hitomi was surprised that she needed to refuse anyone in the first place. Only she and Folken should have known about her power. She could tell by the expression on his face when the first person arrived that he hadn't told anyone. She guessed someone overheard them talking the night she learned about her power, and leaked the secret. However it started, a rumor of Hitomi's power was circulating Tenue, and it was attracting at least half the city to her door.
"What's this visit all about?" Hitomi asked the woman. "What do you want with Lady Hitomi?"
"I'm on an errand for the King. He would like to enlist the lady's help in a . . . personal matter."
Hitomi raised an eyebrow. "What kind of matter?"
The woman lowered her eyes respectfully. "I am not at liberty to disclose that information to anyone but the lady."
There was no arguing with the woman. Hitomi sighed. Her time in Asturia's royal court had taught her that when there was a message to be delivered, the messenger wouldn't breathe a word of it to anyone but the respected party.
"All right, you can come in." Mentally slapping herself for giving in, Hitomi opened the door wider and allowed the woman inside. The woman looked around the humble interior wonderingly, scrutinizing it as if the mystical Lady Hitomi might have been a fraud because her living quarters were less than grand.
Hitomi gestured toward a chair and the woman sat down stiffly. Hitomi crossed her arms and leaned against the windowsill.
"All right, I'm the Lady Hitomi," she confessed. "Tell me exactly what's going on."
As expected, the woman looked uncertain. "If you are the lady, why didn't you tell me when you answered the door?"
Hitomi decided just to tell her the truth. It would probably make more sense than any excuse she could come up with anyway. "Did you miss the sign? I've had too many people around begging me to do things for them I don't want to do. They're easier to get rid of when they don't know it's actually me."
There was silence for a minute as the woman mulled over the idea. In the end, though she was still skeptical, she seemed to decide that Hitomi's story was plausible, and gave her the benefit of the doubt.
"As you may already know," the woman began, suddenly becoming even more formal, "our dear king recently lost his son to the battle of Rampant in Asturia."
Hitomi nodded. Every citizen in Egzardia knew about the death of the crown prince. It was impossible not to know. A small military port on the Asturian bay a short distance from Palas was the location where the Alliance armies gathered in preparation for a planned surprise attack that would spur the beginning of the war. However, Zaibach somehow got wind of the plans, and decided to surprise the Allies with their own attack. Rampant was a massacre. The half-collected Alliance armies hadn't stood a chance, and most of the first battalions sent from Egzardia were slaughtered within the first hour.
"The grief has been most hard on him, and he seeks some way to be healed." Her speech sounded memorized, her acting horrible. Hitomi wasn't falling for it, but she listened anyway. "When we heard about your extraordinary talent to commune with the deceased, the King sent me to make you an offer. He will give you anything within reasonable bounds if you will use your power to help him be with his son again."
The woman's words left Hitomi with no sympathy. She had heard many versions of this same sob story from almost all of her previous visitors, who had come to her pleading for the lives of their loved ones lost in the battle of Rampant.
"I'm sorry," said Hitomi, trying to be polite though she felt like screaming at the woman in frustration. She wasn't going to use her new power for any reason, and risk the chance of it creating another disaster like Palas. "But I don't use my power for any selfish reasons."
"Surely," the woman protested, "reuniting the King and his son is not considered selfish?!"
"When you're dealing with fate, everything is selfish."
"But . . ." The woman's words became desperate. "How can it be interfering with fate if our dear prince was destined to succeed his father as King--but now cannot--and you put things right again?"
"Because the prince was destined to die. If he wasn't, he would have survived." Hitomi was so tired of the woman's stubborn persistence that she didn't bother to mask her blunt honesty.
The woman tried to argue, but all her "buts" and "surelies" could not sway Hitomi's decision. After twenty more minutes of pointless arguing, Hitomi forced the woman out of the room and locked the door. It gave Hitomi an excited feeling of independence to be able to force someone out of her home, like a college student experiencing success living on her own.
Hitomi sighed and flopped backward onto he bed. Judging by the sunbeams on the floor, it wasn't quite noon, signaling that it was almost time to help prepare the night's supper. Arguing with the King's messenger was very tiring, and Hitomi wanted nothing more than to take a nap, but work was work. Besides, how would she prove to Folken that she could take care of herself if she flaked in her first month of employment?
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It was high noon, and the bustling Tenue marketplace was crowded. Folken could hardly move more than an inch in any direction without bumping into someone. Everywhere he looked, there seemed to be twenty new faces, all trying to move in the direction opposite him. There were other things he would rather have been doing than wading through a mass of stinky, disgusting human flesh.
With the use of the Fanelian cloak Hitomi had bought him and the image of a man he saw once in Palas, Folken traveled the city in complete anonymity. Everyone ignored him, but for the first time he could remember, Folken was glad to be alone.
There was something serene in his loneliness that was different from how it usually felt. It was as if the entire world could disappear, and he wouldn't miss it. It wasn't as much an unpleasant feeling as a hopeful one, one whose source and circumstance he didn't fully understand.
He came to a stall filled with manuscripts and stopped. There was already a sizable group of people crowded around to look at its wares, making it difficult for Folken to get a glimpse, but from what he could see, the stand wasn't promising. After spending several hours in the mess of people, Folken was fed up. If there was anything he missed about being Strategos of Zaibach, it was not having to deal with crowds.
He moved on. Somewhere in this damned bazaar there has to be a place selling decent maps.
Though he was skeptical that Hitomi could take care of herself alone in Tenue, Folken had resolved for the fortieth time that morning to return to Asturia. For some reason though, making the decision to leave Tenue had been much harder than deciding to leave Zaibach. He didn't have any reason to stay, except to protect Hitomi.
It felt like a valid enough reason, but the thought remained ever present in his mind that he was not the right person to protect her. After all, every person he cared about, everyone he tried to shelter or help, ended up dead. It was as if he was cursed to be forsaken and alone, and with everything he had done in association with Zaibach, Folken knew he deserved it. His wings, like his confidence, were broken and tangled.
Even if Hitomi offered him to stay with her--and what chance was there of that?--Folken knew he could only decline before he had the chance to make her suffer. The only thing he could give her that wasn't pain or despair--and she would never ask him for anything anyway--was a suitable replacement guide, because anything else would have been a curse.
". . . wanderin' around like a bunch o' righ' fools, they are. Ne'er lookin' where they're goin'," the owner of a shabby, decrepit stall set up a little way off from the crowds muttered sourly to himself. "Ya be needin' a good map ta be gittin' through this 'ere mess."
A heap of neat, detailed maps stuck out against the grimy stall and its haggled, broken-down owner, and they caught Folken's attention. As he approached the stand, its owner gave him a toothless grin. The wizened old man obviously hadn't been decently clean for at least a month, and it appeared that he took much more pride in the stock of his business than anything else.
"Lookin' ta git un-lost there, fella?" he said in a thick outlander accent. "They're all real cheap, they are."
The maps looked to be of much finer craftsmanship than Folken figured the stall owner was capable of. They were dumped in an unorganized mess, which made any kind of browsing completely impossible. Sifting through them was easily the least practical way to find the specific map he was searching for.
"Is there a map of this region somewhere in here?" Folken asked the old man, gesturing at the pile.
"With wut on it?"
"A map would be nice."
The stall owner spat in the dust and glared at Folken. "All yas town folk 'ere take me ta be real fool stoopid, doncha? I know ya wanna map, but with wut countries?"
Folken remained indifferent to the old man's offense. "Everything that touches Asturia, as far north as Zaibach, south as Fried, and east as Daedalus."
The owner scooped up a heap of maps into his arms, and start sorting roughly through them. The maps were made of paper instead of something more durable like parchment, and Folken wondered how much of such handling they could take without falling apart.
"'Ere, I got 'un." He waved a yellowed map in Folken's face. "This's it."
Folken took the map and folded it open. It was exactly what he was looking for. The map showed eight entire countries, as well as parts of others, in surprising detail. It plotted at least five cities or villages in each country, as well as many roads, rivers, forests, and mountain ranges. "Perfect, I'll take it."
The idea of a sale cheered the old man considerably, and he smiled again. "Tha's forty gidaru, then. Wut a great deal yer getting'. Ya seein' the quality there?" He reached out and prodded the map with his callused index finger. "Tha's 'un 'igh-quality sonuvabitch map, there."
Folken sighed. "Thank you." A map of such high quality should have been worth more like one hundred gidaru, but he certainly wasn't about to point that out.
The stall owner beamed. "Ya got a deal, there!" With excited relish, he swept the other maps from the stall countertop and scattered them into an even larger mess. Beneath where they had lay, something sparkled that Folken hadn't seen at first. Light refracted in a tiny rainbow from the surface of a silver glimmering disk, identical to the one Hitomi had shown him a couple weeks ago. Folken picked it up.
"Ah, admirin' my other goods, eh?" asked the old man.
"Where did you get this?"
"Some fella traded it ta me long time ago." He waved his hand to emphasize the passing of a lot of time. "Real pretty, ain' it?"
Folken turned it over. On the other side were words engraved in elegant calligraphy. As he read the message, he felt some hidden meaning laced into the phrase that struck a resonant chord in his heart. The message somehow described the feelings he'd been struggling to explain since arriving in Tenue. They were the feelings that amassed his mind whenever he thought about Hitomi, or the day he would leave her.
"How much for this?" he asked before he even knew he was speaking.
"Tha's my nicest 'un, and I oughta ask a lot more than wut I'm gunna. But since yer buyin' the map 'n all, I'll letcha have it for . . . umm . . . fifteen."
"Done."
The gap-toothed grin stretched to an impossible width as Folken counted out the money and placed it on the counter. This was probably the first sale the creaky stall owner had made in a very long time, which would explain why he was so excited over it. The old man danced in a little triumphant circle as Folken took his purchases and left.
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A quiet knock on her door woke Hitomi from a dreamless sleep under the sunburst orange and red light filtering through the window. She had been excused from serving duty that evening after falling asleep the second time filling pints with ale from the tap.
Hitomi groaned and rolled over, covering her head with a pillow. It was first time in all the months she'd been on Gaea that Hitomi had been asleep without having any weird prophetic dreams. It was a welcome change that she wanted to take advantage of as long as she could.
The knocking persisted. If that's the King's stupid messenger again, I'm staying in bed. There's no way I'm wasting any more time arguing with that woman. But the person at the door had little to do with the King of Egzardia.
"Hitomi?" called a voice from outside. "Are you there?"
"Folken!" Hitomi jumped of bed and swung open the door. "I'm so sorry," she said as she let him in. "I thought you might be this really annoying messenger from the King that I sent away earlier."
"You had a message from King Ezara?" Folken pulled the hood of the black cloak away from his face. "What about?"
"He wants me to bring his dead son back to life." Hitomi frowned distastefully. "I've got morals, and taking orders from some pretentious twit just because he thinks he deserves it more than everybody else is beneath them." She laughed at Folken's shocked expression at the treason she'd just spouted. "Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything stupid. I don't want you to think I'll get in trouble when you're gone."
"Yes, about that." He looked away, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. "I'm ready to leave."
The smile vanished from Hitomi's face. Her thoughts from that afternoon about if this day would ever come returned to her mind in sudden shock. She knew Folken would return to Asturia, but somehow she never thought it would actually happen. It was always something in the future without a set date, something not fully comprehensible. Realizing that this was it, that she'd be all alone soon, sent a chill tingling down Hitomi's spine.
"When?" she asked quietly, all traces of her former boisterousness gone.
"In a few minutes," he replied, watching out the window away from her. "I've already been missing from Asturia too long. So have you."
Hitomi shook her head. "No way. I'm not going back there to cause more problems. Everyone's better off if I stay here. Even me."
"I didn't expect you to change your mind." Folken paused and brought out the map, looking down at it. "I still don't think you should stay here alone, so I bought this for you." He held out the map, his eyes downcast. Why did he have to face her in this situation? He felt the greatest sense of shame in her presence at that moment, as if he was abandoning her selfishly just to save himself. I may as well be bribing her not to hate me for this . . .
Hitomi rubbed the worn creases with her fingers as she gently unfolded it. Wrapped in the center of the map, like fragile tissue paper enfolding a gift, was the engraved disk. Hitomi picked it up. "What's this?"
"Just something I found in the bazaar. It reminded me of that 'CD' you showed me."
"Why?"
"I wanted to give you something--" Folken stopped himself before he went too far. I just don't want to forget her. "For no reason," he answered.
There was a pause, a quiet awkwardness that filled the room as its two occupants got a better grip on their emotions.
"So, I guess this is it," said Hitomi. Her eyes stayed on the CD for a moment, and then she looked up. "Goodbye then, Folken."
We'll part strangers, and I'll let it go . . .
"Goodbye, Hitomi," said Folken, looking for the first time into her eyes and wishing he hadn't. Her voice did well to hide her feelings of betrayal, but it couldn't mask it in her saddening gaze. "I hope you do well here."
No more words were spoken between them. One world, with its actions and consequences, ceased to exist in that moment, as Folken turned and left without glancing back. Hours later, Hitomi was still waiting for the new world to begin.
She stood at the center of the room for a moment, staring at the place where Folken had been. Her mind, with its havocked thoughts, was blank. Her eyes traveled back down to the CD, and she turned it over. On the reverse side was a phrase engraved in graceful, flowing calligraphy. As she read it, her eyes filled with tears.
"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened to us."
-x-X-x-X-x-
"We're leaving here tonight,
There's no need to tell anyone,
They'd only hold us down . . ."
-Evanescence, "Anywhere"
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TO BE CONTINUED . . .
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