The first time he saw her, he thought she was a strange choice.
She was a farmer, with no experience and a large body that was poorly conducive to the hardships of her profession. Her friendliness was off-putting and he often found himself pondering the fate of the island that was left in her barely-capable hands. The Harvest Goddess, he assured himself, had incredibly poor taste in the saviour of the island.
He watched from afar, still pessimistic, as she rang the Red Bell and restored fire to the land. Idle town gossip allowed him to see he was not the only one with reservations, though no one knew her true purpose on the island. It was increasingly hard for the boisterous farmer to obtain support from the island's residents.
Undeterred by what anyone thought of her, the farmer ploughed on and created a thriving, if somewhat unorthodox, farm. She persisted, yet made few friends, and continued to breathe new life into the island.
Their first meeting, and many subsequent others, were awkward.
He had resolved to make particular care not to open his home to any personage, and refused fortunes to all until he was certain of Molly's progress. In those first few weeks, he would leave only at night and take particular care no one saw him. Somehow, she had spotted him on a midnight jaunt to the church grounds.
He, being the caretaker of few words and she being a person of many, clashed spectacularly. The farmer, being inquisitive by nature, had asked him numerous questions. Some were acceptable when coming across a midnight stranger, others were undeniably unsavoury. He told her little, and found he was capable of very poor amounts of speech in her presence, and was left fumbling for any words at all.
"What do you mean 'Wizard'?" she had questioned numerous times in this first altercation, "That's a terrible name! And I thought my parents were cruel..." Molly had told him coarsely.
Yet somehow, he managed to stutter out his occupation as fortune teller and was berated mercilessly for the hours he kept and her need for his talents. His first impression of this encounter was that Molly was a creature of loud extremities and often poor judgement. And though he was not a bastion of social eloquence, she was even less so.
He did not see her again until after the Yellow Bell was rung and earth returned to the island.
After the restoration of this power, Molly made a new habit of visiting him. Her friendliness was tactile to him, new in ways he was unaccustomed to and did not fully understand. In the depths of his mind, he struggled to relearn this notion of human camaraderie. And though he was often annoyed by her antics, she did not give up when met by his stony silence. This determination was frustrating, but endearing, to the Wizard who had spent so much of his long life alone.
The farmer was an enigma. She liked coffee, cats, and had a fleeting interest in books filled with adventure. Slowly, he found more and more of his voice after each of her visits. She was so very brash and often ignorant; he could not help himself from speaking the jumbled mess that resided in his mind. The farmer seemed to note this, and pursued to coax more words from him with unabashed enthusiasm.
Molly also instilled in him a feeling he had not experienced in ages: loneliness. They were so different from one another, and it was this that made their fledgling friendship compelling. He often found he missed her presence.
When Molly stumbled across the Witch Princess, he worried about how the similarities between the women would impact his own relationship with the farmer. It was a new kind of selfishness he could not remember experiencing since his barest memories of youth. Though he resolved to remedy this deformity in his usually calm demeanour, the magic user often found his thoughts wavering to the possibility of losing Molly to one more suited to her nature.
For the good of the island he helped Molly in her endeavour to restore the Witch Princess to her true form, and found her slowly slipping from his grasp. She visited him less after breaking the spell, and more often their meetings were centered on the cat at the church grounds that they had a mutual interest in. Their topics of conversation involved the newest person in Molly's life, and the oldest in the Wizard's. Jealousy was another sudden reaction he had not felt in many years and it vexed him mercilessly; as was the anger felt towards the farmer for grasping at friendship with the Witch Princess.
Often times, he found himself wandering into Fugue Forest after her. These trips, he told himself, served dual purposes. One was keeping an eye on Molly, who often lacked the foresight to keep herself from harm and the second was to collect the precious Fugue Mushrooms. The farmer was noisy, and easy to follow, and chattered incessantly with an invisible companion; more than likely a sprite.
"But Finn! She feeds me! There's no way she's a bad person!" were frequent utterances of the farmer as she navigated the familiar twists and turns of the forest.
If only she knew good people often have misguided purposes.
He counted himself lucky that he stumbled after her the day the Witch Princess set about her usual pranks. The flux of magic while Molly was present was unmistakable. His doubts about the friendship between farmer and witch were confirmed in the few nauseating seconds he entered the house and gazed at Molly's unconscious body, his startled heart beating fast.
The Wizard raised his voice to the Witch Princess for the first time that day, an unnerving behaviour to both magic users. He had railed at her in broken words about her carelessness; she attempted to assure him of her good intentions to set Molly into a more prime physical condition capable of saving the island.
He didn't care, mind reeling with the proper ingredients to help Molly emerge from her Witch-induced stupor.
Tucking an arm under the farmer's legs and wrapping another under her shoulders, he silently cursed her weight and her stupidity while whispering a transportation spell in clear, long, sentences.
It was only after he had set her amongst his mess of bed and books, full of magical herbs to coax her from sleep, that he realized he may have a different sort of affection for the farmer. As with many of his newfound emotions, he was at a loss with what to do with them. They were suffocating him, like a miasma he was forced to fill his lungs with after every breath.
Once, in another life, he had known the world of lovers. He was young then and could remember very little of the processes of his relative youth. He had long ago counted himself above the impulses of regular humans, a result of his extended life. Relationships of that nature were a distraction he had resolved to abandon long ago.
This farmer was loud, obnoxious, and hardly of unparalleled beauty. Perhaps, in freeing himself from the confines of mortals, his very previous perceptions of the opposite sex had been severed. It was nothing less than uncomfortable to entertain such thoughts.
He told himself to think no more on the matter.
Molly's visits became more frequent, despite all her unfounded protests about inappropriateness. Though he made every effort to dissuade her and distance himself from her, the farmer still persisted in her pursuits of friendship. Lately, she had been bringing coffee and various snacks from the Inn. He suspected that, though she had collected the wishes of much of the town, she still had few friends.
The Wizard was grateful for her companionship, despite himself. With the casual slowness that permeated his life, the magic user found he was growing ever fonder of Molly's strange antics and presence in his life.
This fondness was why, when she made a disappearance once more, he found himself bereft of the contentment he felt before. Gazing into his crystal ball allowed him to verify her safety, yet still he felt himself growing disappointed as each day passed with no presence of the woman. He consoled himself by watching how busy she was, compelled once more to save the island. Once, he went so far as to visit her on the farm, gift in hand, as she had done so many times before at his home.
He was met with an unaccustomed distaste and left questioning his own actions ceaselessly for many hours afterwards. Molly was still a puzzle to him.
After much of his usual deliberation, he decided that he would resume his advances, unsure of what progression in their relationship he was striving for. Molly was entirely unhelpful; showing equal parts friendliness, resistance, and plain ignorance. He had trouble believing how truly dense she was, even for a human. The Wizard's attempts to meet Molly outside of their usual confines were met with misinterpretation or Molly's favourite distraction: the church ground's cat.
He played to this distraction and mulled over how their mutual concern for the feline could bring him closer to Molly.
In his younger days, his master had praised him as a strategist, though he found he often over thought Molly. She was a specimen of random thoughts in motion. Her mood swings were nonsensical, whereas he embodied the very essence of logic.
Sometime while on his knees searching for the scruffy cat in the dark, Molly chirping happily at his side, Wizard decided that these swirling emotions, thoughts, and impulses that had plagued him were romantic in nature. Deep down, he had known this all along. He could not remember this feeling, but knew it as unmistakable. They were both lonely, on some level. Perhaps he more so than her; and had found each other to their mutual benefit. The Wizard was convinced of this fact.
It was not divine intervention, such things he knew were a myth disrupted through centuries and projected as truth. The Harvest Goddess and the Harvest King worked tangible miracles, and had no time for playing with the complexities of was no fate that had brought them together, only circumstance. They had little in common, yet that did not matter at all. The Wizard, though he knew himself as immortal, still possessed the intricacies of a human heart.
And so he played the role he was unaccustomed to, walking her home with misplaced gentry and leaving her little room to mistake his actions before scrambling off as if he were a man centuries younger. Yet still she resisted, though he noticed with curiosity her visits increased once more and became a precursor to other events involving him in her foreign life.
For now, the Wizard was sated with this progression, though his thoughts were continually invaded by her presence.