He might not have grown up kind had he been born into different circumstances, with a different form, a less frail form. There’s no way to know, if kindness was his natural state or if it was something begotten because of his fragility, the two things are long entwined.
(His parents were kind, in a way, but they were also cruel; leaving them there like that, their glass children. A passive cruelty, that act – not looking back as you followed her into the ocean.)
She offers her homeland’s name, and it’s distantly familiar, the way many of Beqanna’s lands are – names he knows indirectly, names overheard but not directed at him. This is common, for him. He nods, listening. She mentions the volcano, briefly, and he wonders what it’s like, to live near a thing capable of such destruction.
Something else follows, a confession - it doesn’t feel like home anymore - and this makes his heart twist for a moment. Had the waterfalls ever felt like home, or had it been the blinding nature of love, bewitching him? He has no answer, suspects he never will. Like his kindness and fragility, they are too entwined to be parsed out, made sense of.
“It happens, sometimes,” he says, “home stops feeling like home. Or it changes.”
And the meadow, the forest – do they feel like home, now? He doesn’t think so – more, they were the default, they are what he accepted.
“I used to live somewhere else,” he says, “but it stopped feeling like home.”
That’s easier to say than I died there.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “it’s gone now, anyway.”
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark