5. Hollow - A Moment To Think

It is another one of those nights. Taking shelter under the large oak trees, mostly covered by branches thick with leaves, though rain droplets still drizzle through the gaps. Tents are hampered more by the lack of space than the storm overhead.

Alexandra stares at the campfire, the pile of burnt wood long dead, cooled and dampened by the constant drizzle from the last few hours. Around her, their small group of knights and servants chatter amongst themselves, huddled in groups of three or four. She is dimly aware of her parents, beyond the treeline. Out of sight of any prying eyes. Whispering about her; the daughter too young to fight, too naive to lead, too innocent to be asked for her counsel.

Two years since that blasted day and still her father sees her as a child that needs to be coddled. They have survived mercenaries and bandits and her brother’s own knights, survived cold, harsh winters underneath starry skies, yet his opinion has not changed.

What would it take for you to see me? she thinks, expression falling. An onlooker might think she looks pained; perhaps she is, but Alexandra thinks of all that she has lost and the little she has gained and just feels… empty.

Even the beastfolk regard me higher than my own father, though even those margins are a mere, fine line.

Her eyes dart from the fire to the group of beastfolk - the fairn, she reminds herself - sat on the opposite edge of the camp. They have, so far, been more proactive in seeking out conversation with her fellow countrymen than the other way around. Alexandra herself has been wary, though that is less to do with prejudice and more to do with fresh wounds of betrayal.

Where she has tried to avoid them, they have instead sought her out. In particular the large Kasaneor. The word still sits foreign on her tongue, but she is trying to learn and, really, isn’t that all that matters?

She thinks he appreciates her effort. Hopes he does, really. That alone is enough to pry feeling back into her bones and she clings to it, a moth to a flame, flying close enough that she can feel a shred of warmth. Anything to brighten the darkness settling over her, to melt the frosted hollow of her core.

“You cannot carry this hyllin with you forever,” she remembers him saying, little over a week ago when she had been particularly quiet and brooding, intent on avoiding everyone. “It will eat at you until there is nothing left but the husk of a once proud woman.”

You don’t know me, she had wanted to scream in his face. Instead, she had inquired once more into his language. A rare secret that he felt the need to share with a desperate, lonely girl. What does hyllin mean?

All he had answered that question with was a wry smile and an awfully cryptic, extremely vague, “you will know once you free it from your core.”

Alexandra finds her gaze wandering to Erakos now. She has half a mind to confront him, demand that he tell her what that damned word means, and be done with the whole thing. But the way he smiled. The exact phrasing he had used. Almost like he knew, somewhere in her future - maybe far away or maybe not that far at all - she would heal.

And if a stranger believes I can heal, she thinks, unaware of the smile creeping slowly onto her face, then why shouldn’t I believe it too?