Chapter Text
is there such a thing as destiny? fate?
you are ten when you are sitting on your father’s lap as he takes your small palm and examines it closely. he traces the small lines on your still-soft hands.
“you will have a good life. a happy life,” he smiles proudly, as if it had already happened.
you do not know what he sees when he looks at your hand. after all, you are only ten. you just know that it makes your father happy, and his smile is infectious. you are smiling back at him, filled with pride as well.
those hands have grown since then. they have become bigger, just as the rest of you has. there are a few more lines tracing them, like flowing rivers across an otherwise barren land. most noticeable, perhaps, is that they have grown colder and more lonely. the feeling of your father’s hands tracing your own have become long-lost now, but you can still almost feel them when you close your eyes. sometimes, you try to mimic exactly how he had done it, slowly but with a certain amount of pressure as well. but you can never do it. you guess there are some things that only a father can do.
now, no longer a little girl but a woman, you live alone, in a relatively small village. in the midst of the ongoing conflict between the large, powerful rival kingdoms of arborea and aecoris, life is difficult. conflict is commonplace, and villages like yours are often the subject of conquest. otherwise, it is quiet. you are poor, yes, but you are poor together. and it seems that a sense of camaraderie that is born when people experience the same misfortunes together. there is a strange comfort in the fact that you are not alone, even in things like poverty. you work together, you grieve together, you starve together, you eat together, and you celebrate together. there is beauty in this, you think.
despite this, you are still alone, and you wish you were ten again, in your father’s lap as he smiles down at you, or in your mother’s embrace as she sings you a lullaby. you wish you were eleven, insisting that you would be able to sleep on your own now, that you were not scared of monsters anymore. but you cannot go back. you are still you, as you are now, and you are still alone. and it is strange. you had always loved deeply, intensely, and easily, and when you had lost that love, you had to learn again. love is now as easy to you as it was once, but sometimes, it is hard to see the beauty of the world.
it is on a day like this when you are sitting on the fields barefoot, tracing the lines on your palm, and humming the lullaby that your mother always sang to you. for some reason, the lines that had once seemed as though they were set in stone feel strange today. they are almost fluid, more shallow than they had been before. have they changed? there is a sense of worry that suddenly fills you, but you push it away, just like how you push away the thrumming of the earth beneath your feet.
and you swear to yourself that you will have a good life. a happy life.