and where you invest your love, you invest your life
He is a stranger, but something tells him he is the first she has ever met.
There is something about her that tells him she hardly ever knew a stranger; there was something so open and inviting about her. Something so alien in the way that she smiled at him, visibly relaxed while he stood there with muscles tense and his mouth pulled taut. He had never been as calm, as open, as gentle as she was now. She was a spot of sunshine in the snow, dark and warm and completely foreign.
He had no precedence by which to judge her or determine his next course of action. He guffawed at her comment a little, the sound rusty and unused, unsticking from his throat and peeling from his tongue. “The drawback of invisibility, I suppose.” One corner of his mouth life valiantly into a smile again, but it was crooked and all wrong, so he quickly wiped it from his expression—face going stony once more.
“Australis,” he repeats the name, thinking on it for a moment. It was an odd name (although he had not met many other souls and truly did not have much to compare it against), but he decided that he liked it. It was strong and interesting and tasted like spices and adventure and things that he could not name.
“My name is Tobiah,” he offers, out of absentminded politeness more than anything. The goodness of God—or at least that is what his mother had told him his name had meant. Secretly, he thought that it must have been some kind of running joke; surely his existence was no sign of a benevolent being.
Bringing his slate gaze back to her, he watching unblinking for several moments before he shrugged and then pointed his Roman nose toward the border. “Ah, no.” He shifted uncomfortably, unsure if whether he was going to be reprimanded for walking into a kingdom he had no claim toward. “I thought about it when I was younger,” he thinks about offering more about his decision but draws it back. “But I live on the outskirts over there.” He straightens up a little before looking back to her. “What about you?”