returning, pt. iii

I missed last week because, as you may imagine, I had other things on my mind.

We were separated when the empire began to tear itself apart. She spent her days in the empire's heart, I'm told; every now and then I'd hear a story with her name in it. They loved her, there, as she tried her best to maintain the fragile peace, to give voice to the downtrodden. She was a champion of the people, a symbol of hope for people who otherwise would long have given into despair--at least, that's what the stories said. Sometimes I wondered if there weren't stories where she was the villain, confounding the peace, poisoning the minds of the populace with false hope and empty promises. But if those stories existed, they never found me out in the hinterlands. And just hearing her name made me smile.

Some days, I'll admit, I resented that she made pretty speeches while I lived by the sword--out this far from the heartlands, what peace and stability the empire had once offered had long since faded away. So the people of the hinterlands made their own peace, and when that was threatened, they turned to vagabonds and mercenaries like myself to make things right. It's possible some of them thought of me as a hero later, and I know many of those I crossed swords with were certain I was a villain. Some of them probably even told stories about me, but none of those stories seemed to travel.

It was years later when we reunited. She had, impossibly, won. At first I hoped that we could carry on as if neither of us carried those years with us, that we could be just as inseparable as before, be just as wonderful and impossible together as we had been. But neither of us could pretend the years hadn't happened. Neither of us could return to the people we were before.

We tried. Somehow it was worse that there was no hostility, not even any real friction, just this distance that neither of us knew how to bridge, growing wider with every passing day. In the end I packed up my things and slipped away in the night, for good this time. And I hope that someday she hears stories about me and finds it in her to smile.