Part Five — The Man Who Didn’t Look Away

　I walked for six days before my body made the decision my mind had been too stubborn to make on its own.

I don't remember falling.

I remember the tree line tilting sideways.

And then nothing.

And then waking up somewhere that wasn't the forest floor — a low fire, a wool blanket that smelled like woodsmoke and old leather, and a man sitting across from me sharpening a blade like he had nowhere else to be.

Okay.

Not dead.

That's — actually kind of a nice surprise at this point.

He was human, or human enough to pass for it at a glance, weathered in the way people get when they've spent more years outdoors than in.

A long scar ran from his jaw to his collarbone, old and pale, the kind that had long since stopped meaning anything to him.

"You're awake," he said, not looking up from the whetstone.

"Good. Was starting to think I'd hauled a corpse three miles for nothing."

"...Where am I?"

"Three miles from where you collapsed. Beyond that, does it matter?"

Fair point.

I tried to sit up and immediately regretted it — everything ached in the specific way that told me my body had been running on nothing but stubbornness for days.

He tossed me a water skin without comment, waited until I'd had enough of it to speak again.

"Name's Doran," he said.

"Yours?"

"Kai."

"Just Kai?"

"Just Kai."

He accepted that easily enough, which I appreciated more than I let on.

A man who doesn't push for the parts of your story you're not ready to give is a rare thing, in any world.

It took him less than a day to notice what I was.

I caught him watching my hands once, when I pulled a thread of anti-mana out without thinking, testing whether I still could after nearly starving myself walking in a straight line for six days.

Red at the core.

Purple bleeding at the edges.

The same mismatch that had made a merchant look away from me in a border town once, and made my own mother's face do something she hadn't wanted me to see.

Doran didn't look away.

He just went very still, the way a man goes still when he's recalculating something important.

"That's not a color I've seen before," he said eventually.

Careful.

Not hostile — just careful.

"Yeah," I said.

"Me neither. Not on anyone else, anyway."

"You know what it means?"

"No."

That part, at least, was true.

"I know two dragons thought it meant something bad enough to kill my parents over."

I hadn't meant to say that much.

It came out anyway, flat and quiet, and once it was out I didn't especially want to take it back.

Doran didn't say anything for a long moment.

He set the whetstone down.

"How old are you?"

"Eight."

"And you've been walking alone for six days."

"Longer, if you count before that."

He exhaled through his nose — not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.

"Gods. Alright."

He picked the whetstone back up, like the decision had already been made and didn't need announcing.

"You're not fit to walk another six days on your own, whatever you are.

So you're not going to."

"I didn't ask you to take me anywhere."

"No," he agreed.

"You didn't."

I want to tell you I argued more than I did.

I didn't have it in me.

Some part of me — the part that was still eight years old under everything else — was just tired of being alone in a way that had nothing to do with my legs.

"There's a town two days from here," he told me, over a dinner that was, mercifully, not something I'd burned myself.

"Small. Nobody important comes through it, which usually means nobody important's looking for anything there either.

You'll be able to rest.

Figure out what you actually want to do next."

"And you?

What do you want out of this?"

He considered that question longer than I expected.

"I don't know yet," he said finally.

"Ask me again once I've decided whether that aura of yours is going to get me killed."

Honest, at least.

I can work with honest.

"For what it's worth," I said, "I don't know what it means either.

I just know it's mine, and I'm not planning on apologizing for it to the next thing that shows up wanting me dead over it."

Something shifted in his expression at that — not quite approval, not quite anything I had a name for.

Just a man recalculating, again, and landing somewhere slightly different than where he'd started.

"Get some sleep, Kai," he said.

"Two days is a long walk, and you're not walking it on an empty stomach a second time."

I slept better that night than I had in the six before it.

Not because anything was fixed.

Just because, for the first time since the mountain, there was another set of eyes keeping watch while I did.

One person.

That's not nothing.

That's not the family I had.

But it's a start.