Faithful Pebble
Part Fifty

He just did it. He just saved her, but the wanderer didn't gasp like the child had in the bushes, neither did he cheer like the crowds might have in the town, nor cringe. He didn't shake with a mixture of worry or relief like the Woodcutter, the Madame or the Drunk—the Town Hero currently prancing with his buddies towards Town Hall, towards the office of its stern faced Headsmen, the child's grandfather. But instead, he focused entirely upon the girl, the maiden whose hand was still caressing the emerald blades of the grass between her black clawed fingers. Those fingers slowly moved on to the scattered daises and their dripping dandelions. Dancing here and there in the wind, they were the only thing that moved. He was waiting for something, the wanderer, anything—well, not quite anything. Pebble had yet to speak, had yet to do anything beyond—

The wanderer held his breath as did the child. The child, the kitten, the littlest pickpocket was caught between the dangerous decision of whether if his desire to get a closer look outweighed his fear of getting caught. The wanderer didn't know the child had followed him and certainly the girl didn't know. Even as young as he was, the child could easily perceive that to reveal himself now would be entirely an unwelcome event. There was something fragile growing in the meadow where the well was held, where the wanderer now stood, where the girl used the well to stand to her feet. Something was building, or breaking, that caused the child to sit still and the wanderer to keep his silence.

The dew soaked hood bowed in and out where a mouth perhaps sat open. The pointed tip tilted back, up and around as the girl, now clearly a young woman, looked out into the woods, out over the hill where the town sat, up into the sky where the stars danced and the moon smiled. She stared at it. The stars were more numerous than they ever were in her memory. The moon, a mythical creature once remembered and then forgotten, something talked of once upon a time, hovered shyly like a dream. She stood like that for a long time. They stood like that, the child, the wanderer and the girl until finally her head dropped and her focus shifted from the moon to the man standing uncertainly before her.

The wanderer licked his lips and stepped back. Unaware, his foot, now feet beyond the place he'd first dropped, nearly stepped on the chain of his pocket watch. Ticking quietly, marching silently backwards in the emerald grass, the watch sat forgotten. Like the slick gleam of a taunt razor wire, the second hand glinted sharply in the moonlight. The wanderer stared. Knowing somewhere lost beneath that coarse brown hood, two lonely eyes met his calmly— No, he thought. She was breathing too heavily for that, her hands now hugging the flesh of her arms, folding her arms—no, reaching out towards his.

Again, the wanderer stepped back. Nearly colliding with its winding key, with its silver rippled crown, the wanderer might have snapped the lid open—if it wasn't open already. Tilted face down in the grass where the girl had absently dropped it, the watch allowed its glittering light to fade in the darkness, in the grass, in the dirt, in the earth above the world beneath it. Still, the wanderer was oblivious to this. He was caught instead as the girl's arms, her hands, those black clawed fingers tentatively reached to touch one of his own. It rose to play with a lapel of his tunic and then caressed gently—more genteelly than he might have accredited—the stubbled curve of his cheek.

She could see him more clearly in the moonlight, in spite the hood draped below her chin. Again, it bowed. The curve of its tattered fabric tilted, then drifted and then crumbled. "You are real," she whispered. Her black clawed hand retracted a little. "I was afraid."

And then suddenly, she pounced. Hugging him fiercely, her words collapsed into mumbling, her mumbling into cries, and her cries into wails. Her wails came just as suddenly as her embracing arms. Quickly, they knocked him to the ground crushing on his landing the watch tick-tick-ticking beneath his feet.

The watch ticked.

The watch tocked.

And then…

It stopped.

Unnoticed by all, including its owner, the watch stopped and the wanderer just sat. Beneath the moon, beneath the stars, before an empty well, the wanderer held a girl crying seven years worth of tears. Like a slipping drop of a dandelion's dew, they seeped into the lapels of his tunic, the color of the eyes of an ever grinning child.

Thanks for reading! - Calla