Carefully, the woman poured some water into the man's mouth. His head was resting on her lap and he was breathing weakly. She could hear the air faintly rasp past his lungs.

He squinted his eyes in pain when he came to his senses. Burning tears welled up in his eyes when he opened them.

''I still can't believe I found someone else,'' he hoarsely managed to bring out and his shoulders started to shake.

She helped him sit upright on the log next to her. It wasn't until now that she realised how little he weighed, his bones could literally be felt through his clothing. She didn't want to think about what would have happened if she had traveled to a different town instead.

''Do you think you can eat something?'' she asked and reached out a can of white beans in tomato sauce.

He basically snatched it out of her hands and gulped it down in mere seconds. Horrified, she watched him swallow the beans whole.

''My name is Ivar,'' he said in a cracked voice as he wiped the sauce off his mouth, ''forgive me, for I cannot remember my last name.''

She had never heard his accent before and could only assume he was from the far North.

''My name is Saskia,'' she said, ''Saskia Springer.'' Saying it out loud, she felt estranged from her own name. She wondered how much longer it would have taken for her to have forgotten it.

He nodded.

''What village are you from?'' she asked, ''You must have traveled far. I came from Ragoku, just before where wall Rose used to be.''

She pointed westward to emphasize where she had traveled from.

He looked at her in bewilderment. ''I'm from the internment zone in the city of Liberio.''

Now it was her turn to let the gears in her head grind. ''In all fairness, there is no city with that name on the map.''

''Not on your map indeed.''

Her eyes widened. ''What are you trying to say?''

He gave her an assuring smile. ''You might want to prepare yourself, Saskia. I'm afraid everything you've been told and taught in your life about this land you live in... is a lie.''

The next hour he told her about his country; Marley. He told her how the people from her country are called Eldians and considered to be spawns of the devil. He had lived his entire life suppressed in an isolated part of the city. He was part of the Ymir cult, which consisted of Eldian people and was considered a criminal offense.

''Did they use smoke on you to make you turn into titans?'' she asked.

He shook his head. ''They injected us with spinal fluid from a titan and threw us over the wall to roam forever. I was the only one of us who had turned into a malformed titan with limbs so weak I could only crawl.''

She almost did not dare to ask. ''Ivar,'' she took a deep breath, ''in what year were you arrested and shipped to this land?''

''It's one of the few things that I remembered,'' he melancholically replied, ''it was in the spring of the year 832.''

She almost gasped for air in shock.

''Just tell me,'' he assured her, ''for how long have I been crawling away from that dreadful wall?''

A silence followed.

''Twenty-two years,'' she softly said.

He chuckled. It was the only reaction his brain could come up with. It quickly turned into a roar of laughter, as if someone had just told the funniest joke in history.

''Time really is relative, isn't it?'' he said, catching his breath, ''I stopped counting after just two weeks.''

''It were some lonely decades...'' he reminisced, ''you're just the second encounter I've had in all those years.

People outside the walls. Hope flared up in her heart. Could they have been...?

''It must have been years ago, but these soldier troops went past me, pitying my state.''

''The survey corps...'' she whispered to herself.

''One of them regularly came back to spend time with me.'' He smiled and lay down on his back as he now felt his body protesting against the unfamiliar sensation of food in his stomach.

When he turned his head towards her again, his facial expression suddenly changed. His brows knitted together in a studying frown. ''He had your eyes.''

Saskia felt her heart skip a beat. Tears pricked behind her eyes, but her skin was too numb to notice them streaming down her cheeks.

''Connie...'' she gasped for air to call his name.

He tilted his head. ''Connie?''

''He's my son,'' she said as her entire body started to shake with shock, ''you met my son, he's alive!''

He fell silent. ''I wish I could share your happiness, Saskia, but it was years ago...''

''I know, but-''

''You must have sensed or seen it too,'' he raised his voice, ''the hundreds of giant titans that flattened the earth.''

''We can't be the only survivors!' she exclaimed, ''The titans should be gone by now!''

He looked down in remorse. ''I'm sorry, but I think we were the only lucky ones because we were still in our titan forms when it happened.''

She sat back and buried her face in her knees, defeated. ''I just want some hope to hold on to...'' she said as the tears kept dripping down her face, forming streams on her dirt-stained cheeks.

Ivar reached out and gently grasped her wrist with his bony hand. She looked up, barely able to see through the tears.

His hollow eyes still had a light burning in them. ''If it's hope you want, we'll keep looking.''

Weeks went by. Saskia and Ivar decided to stay in the little town until they both were strong enough to make the journey to the edge.

According to Ivar, Saskia's country of Eldia was in fact an island. She had never heard of the term before, but was told it was a landmass surrounded by an endless body of salt water called the 'Ocean'.

She still had a hard time believing all of this. She didn't even know what was beyond the wall close to her village, let alone what was behind the outer one. For all she knew, there could be tower-high horses behind it, or a forest full of pink trees. Only the survey corps knew, for they were the only humans to have seen the world beyond the walls the rest of the country would look up to all their lives.

It was a five hour ride to where Wall Maria had been. That's where the real challenge would start. They both had no idea which direction to head to from there on, nor did they know how long they had to travel. Although Ivar had spent all his titan life outside the walls, he was not able to retrace his journey to the remains of Wall Rose.

Five Hours until she would witness the view only the bravest soldiers had seen before. The view she never wanted her son to see.