Chapter 171: Leon’s Story [4]

She made a sound like something had hit her. He heard her step back. "Why did you call me that? Why are you calling me that?"

He didn’t answer.

"Is this about the fountain?" She rushed forward and grabbed his sleeve. Tears were already running. "I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have gotten frustrated! Please! I take it all back!"

Leon reached over and gently took her wrist and moved her hand off his sleeve. "Please. Move aside."

"You’re really leaving?!"

"Yes."

"Then look at me! Look at me and tell me why!"

He couldn’t. He knew what would happen if he looked at her face right now. He knew with absolute certainty that if he saw her eyes his legs would stop working and he would never leave this room.

"Leon." Her voice cracked into something desperate and ragged. Her hands found his. "Please don’t go."

He started moving toward the door.

Her arms came around his waist from behind and she held on with everything she had. Her face pressed against his back and he could feel her shaking.

"Please. Don’t leave me."

He stopped walking. He couldn’t make his legs move with her arms around him. His jaw locked.

"I can’t live without you," she said against his back. Her voice was breaking apart with every word. "I wanted to tell you for so long. I kept trying to find the right moment." She was crying fully now. He could feel it through his shirt. "I love you Leon. I’m in love with you. So please. Please don’t leave."

His heart was hammering so hard he could hear it.

Every part of him was screaming. Every single part. His arms wanted to turn around. His hands wanted to find her face. Everything that had lived quietly inside him for years without being named was awake and thrashing against the walls he’d built for it.

But the advisor’s voice came through all of it like something cold poured over a fire.

If you stay her future is ruined. She deserves better than a talentless orphan who can’t manifest a spirit. She deserves someone who can actually protect her. She deserves a real future.

He couldn’t be the thing that dragged her down.

Aurelia looked up at him through a blur of tears. "Don’t you feel the same way?" Her voice was barely held together. "Don’t you have anything for me?"

Leon stood there with his eyes closed.

He breathed in once. He breathed out.

He opened his mouth.

"I’m sorry."

Her breath hitched.

"But." He made himself say it. Made his mouth form the words. Forced them out past everything inside him that was fighting against them. "I don’t feel the same way."

The silence that followed was the worst silence he had ever lived through.

Aurelia’s hands went slack. Her grip loosened. The trembling that had been in her arms since she’d held him simply stopped. Like something in her had stopped responding.

"You don’t," she said.

It wasn’t even a question anymore. It was just the shape of something that had broken.

Leon couldn’t speak.

Then her legs gave out.

She went down to the cold stone floor slowly like all the strength had been drained out of her at once. She wrapped her arms around herself and the sobs that came were the full kind. The kind that come from somewhere below the chest. The kind that a person can’t control or compose or make quieter.

"Leon..." she wept against her own knees. "Please..."

He stepped past her.

Every step felt like walking through something solid. Something that should have stopped him. His feet kept moving because if they stopped he was going to reach for her and if he reached for her none of it would hold.

"LEON!"

Her voice shattered across the hallway and followed him down it and through the next corridor and all the way to the palace gates. He didn’t stop. He kept walking through the gate and past the threshold and then when the gate was behind him and the dark wilderness of the road opened up ahead of him something inside him finally lost whatever it had been holding.

He ran.

Fast. Faster. The tears came all at once and blurred everything into streaks of moonlight and shadow. He ran and he did not look back because he knew with absolute certainty that if he turned around and saw the palace lit up behind him he would run back to her and he would never be able to leave again.

His feet hit the road and kept hitting it and he ran until the palace was gone and the lights were gone and there was only darkness and the sound of his own broken breathing and the tears he’d been lying to himself about for years coming down his face with nothing to stop them.

High up in a grand corridor window Arvendis stood looking out at the darkness.

He watched Leon’s figure grow smaller. Then smaller. Then gone.

The smile that moved across his face was slow and cold and deeply satisfied.

"Goodbye Leon," he said to the empty night.

His eyes narrowed.

"Don’t ever come back."

Several grueling days had bled together since Leon walked out of those palace gates.

By the time his feet crossed the border into the Astral Kingdom he had no more coins in his pocket and no plan in his chest.

He had told himself on the road that things would work out. That he would find somewhere to sleep and find some work and figure out what to do with the wreckage of his life one piece at a time.

The Astral Kingdom didn’t care about what he told himself.

The little money he had left vanished within two days. Cheap bread and clean water cost more than he remembered and finding work without a name or connections or a roof over your head turned out to be nearly impossible.

People didn’t hire someone who smelled like the road and had nothing but tired eyes and worn-out boots to recommend them.

So Leon kept moving and kept failing to find anything and kept going hungry and after a while the hunger stopped feeling like urgency and started feeling like just another thing that existed in his body that he didn’t have the energy to address.