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The last time I’d seen my little sister, she’d been thirteen years old, just entering adolescence. She’d been skinny and awkward, too shy to speak comfortably with strangers.
When I tried to compare that image with the one I saw now of the young dark elf woman sitting across from me, chatting animatedly with the waitress who had brought our lunch over to our table in the corner of the tavern, I found that it was difficult to find the similarities between the two.
I knew I shouldn’t have been so surprised; we’d been apart for five whole years—years in which she had grown up, something I’d been aware of even before she’d arrived here in Elturel t- o visit. I’d known she wasn’t a kid anymore.
But it turned out that knowing it had to do with more than just knowing it as a fact, as I was quickly starting to learn.
She had grown up—and I’d missed the whole thing, all so that I could run off to find training in the way of the paladin, for reasons that I realized were purely self-serving in the end, no matter what I intended to do with that training once it was through.
I’d done it for myself; nothing could change that simple fact.
I was torn from my silent brooding when a strip of bread crust suddenly came flying at my nose from across the table. Blinking, I looked up from my soup bowl to find Fanala—the waitress she’d been talking to was nowhere in sight—gazing at me from her seat with narrowed blue eyes, another piece of crust in her hand, as if she was ready to toss another if need be.
“Hey, Xier, are you even listening to me?” Fanala demanded.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking myself. “What were you saying?”
She sighed. “Gods, are you always this spacey now? You’ve been like this all day; is something wrong? If you’ve got someplace you need to be, I’m not going to try and hold you up.”
“No,” I was quick to respond. The last thing I wanted her to think was that I didn’t want to be here.
“Then why are you so quiet?”
“I’m always quiet.”
“Well, yeah, but not the broody sort of quiet,” she insisted. “More of a…thoughtful type of quiet.”
“I am thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing.”
“Ah, okay.” Fanala leaned back in her seat, scrunching up her face and staring off into space.
I frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking. About nothing.” She smirked as she said the last part, and I couldn’t help but groan.
But even as the sound escaped me, I smiled.
Maybe she hadn’t changed so much after all.