The Unkahi of Torik

"Before I return your love, you must know my place in the Vigil. There is sorrow I cannot be separated from, and you must accept if you are to accept me."
Kidjina sat with Marq in their cave, her face dancing in shadows from the oil lamp. They sat like they did after every hunt since she had taken him in. This was where they talked, where they argued and laughed, and where he had lost the count of the moons.

"This sorrow has no name, for that name has been forgotten."
From beneath her robes, she brought forth another oil lamp, similar to the one that flickered upon them now. But cracked, damaged. Old.
"I found this Moji when i was just a child. Deep in a glacier on the coast of Torik." She leaned over the broken lamp and breathed softly onto it. A single word.

"Kahi."
Her breathe turned to mist, which swirled over the lamp, hovering like a tiny spectral flame. It was pale, blue and moved more like water than flame.
Marq felt his limbs get heavy, and the shadows on the hut walls grow darker. A constriction in his throat. A heaviness in his chest. The giddiness of hope and expectation for their future together that had filled him just moments before was now gone.
A strange voice whispered from the spectral lamplight. It murmured and rasped words that Marq could not understand, but at their sound, a single swollen tear rolled down his cheek.
Kidjina looked at him and smiled a sad smile as she gathered the lamp back into her robes, and Marq could breathe once more.
"This is one of the forgotten, the ancestors who no-one now remembers." she turned her eyes to the floor, "They... I must find them... protect them, keep them from fading altogether... until we can bring them to Wala's embrace."
Marq finally found his voice, "What... when is that?"
"Maybe..." her voice cracked, "Maybe never. Maybe forever."
Marq reached out and touched her hand. She looked up at him again.
"Then forever it is." he said as their eyes found each other, both filled with tears, each reflecting the other.
Another smile now, and another, and each of these free from the weight of time.