Farewells

(A futile, halfhearted attempt at developing Miri’s character.)

1. Few things tether her to this place. There are only meaningless familial obligations and the thought of leaving an empty room behind. Maybe somebody will ask her family where she is one day, a brief and uninvested attempt at small talk. She knows her mother will simply laugh and make a charming excuse, inwardly relieved that her daughter is gone.

2. She is not afraid of death. On the contrary, she has always been comforted by the inevitability of it. Whether people form close ties with others or not, they will all meet the same end, the same final separation. As vague as the concept is, it has always made her feel better for being alone.

Now there are too many bodies around her. Twitching in the middle of sleep, scratching their legs, chewing too loudly, laughing uproariously. She doesn’t speak much to the others, but there seems to exist an unspoken agreement: Where we go, you follow. Where you go, we go too.

A part of her is afraid of their absence. When she prays over the dead after each battle, she has to suppress the part of her that succumbs to relief. For now, the corpses are all unfamiliar, nameless. At night, when the campfire has died to a dull glow and the others lie prone and unmoving under the stars, she finds herself wondering if she can welcome separation after all.

3. They move from place to place, and soon the names of people they meet and the towns they pass through all begin to blend together and lose meaning. This is the kind of life she signed up for. Up until now, she has always viewed herself as a perpetual visitor, tied to nothing but the motley little band she follows into haphazard bloodshed. She tells herself she hasn’t minded any of it yet: detachment is a habit of hers, and it is a difficult one to break.

Yet they have stayed at this place for a month, an unprecedented attempt at stability. Now her sheets are crumpled, soft, and familiar. She eats the same meal for breakfast each morning—substandard fare for a castle, but reassuringly consistent all the same. She has memorized the hallways so that she can wander them at night, quietly disentangling bad dreams from reality. And she has learned how to separate one voice in particular from all the others, learned how beautiful her own name can sound when coming from the mouth of someone incendiary.

But this is her last night here. The other side of the bed is still sweet with the warmth of a body that is not hers, a body now gone to rest elsewhere in the castle. Their separation is more than simply physical—this she knows, this she already knew, and yet she allows herself to feel loss. It is an emotion far too imbued with life to ignore.

She still cannot bring herself to fathom this particular goodbye completely. But in the morning, as she always does, she leaves without looking back.

1. iridelle posted this