HOLLOW

AGÁPE, KALOPSIA

Though his descendants left the village, Hiraeth did not.

Reverie saw it all. Wandered where she could reach and watched him live. After her death, Hiraeth seemed to lose complete interest in their pursuit. The key, everything they wanted to be, was forgotten.

Hiraeth did not fight the war that broke after her death and led to the fall of her kingdom. He was not Kalopsian nor Cirillian after all. Until her family members were found dead in their chambers one morning, battle raging on the frontlines and their death's thought a quiet Cirillian attack, and even after, Hiraeth kept to the shadows and masked himself with dark hair, even colouring the beard he let grow on his face. From what she saw, under the rule of Cirille, then the only kingdom, he got work as a blacksmith and kept a routine that she memorized until the end of his days.

Reverie saw him live, moving on with his life without really doing so, the shadows forever hunting his blue eyes, more gelid each day that passed.

Reverie saw him marrying and slicing a dagger through her buried heart.

But Reverie was happy for him. She did not wish Hiraeth to live forever in the haunts of what had happened in the past, to live trapped there.

As she was.

For that, Reverie tried to be happy when she saw him walking side by side with a blonde girl. Her face was sweet, and her tone light. She was a commoner and became his housewife. Nyeki was her name.

Reverie saw him have kids. Three. Three beautiful girls that should have been hers.

And she saw every one of them grow old. Watched as his kids grew to become just as gorgeous as he was. Watched as, until the day he died, he lived his days with shadows clouding the happiness in his eyes as he held his kids in his arms and played with them, or when he kissed his wife and searched for something that was not, could not be, in her brown eyes.

Reverie watched him go up to the waterfall and kneel on the margin, gaze at the moonlight reflected on the dark waters as if waiting for something to happen. Watched as he slept during those full moons on the grassy sand and saw the tears and rage haunting him. It was as if no time had passed at all. The same fury held in his gaze.

And Reverie watched as, in the end, he chose to die in those waters, coming one night to the top of the waterfall. He stood there gazing up at the stars for quite some time, a different kind of light in his eyes.

Hope... maybe.

Reverie wanted to reach and tell him he would not meet her because she had not moved on, but her soul was hurting so much at the perspective of what his life had been because of her, what he was about to do because of her, that she could not manage to stop him and haunt him a second more.

Revery only watched as he said to the sky, "They robbed our chance. But we are going to build our kingdom in the stars." A single tear fell from his bright and livid eyes. "And we are going to conquer it all." And then, Hiraeth leapt from the stones and threw himself in the raging waterfall.