Victoriously Yours,

Impersonally Forcing

Just tell her. Tell her you don't want to marry her. Cmon, do it.

"So what is it you wanna talk about?" Her fingers trailed up his bare arm and he somehow felt more naked without his golden bands. And naked in a bad way.

Yuh looked at him expectantly. As if she was ready to hear a heartfelt good news.

Yisrael took a deep breath.

He had been lying to himself. He thought he could go ahead and forgot. He was supposed to move on. Marry a woman he knows doesn't feel for him just as he did.

Yuh and him weren't going to make it to the finish line because they didn't even have the track to race in.

He was on a different race altogether. His track was busy filled with him simply running after River.

Simply thinking about her made him gnash his own teeth.

That woman was the hardest, most likely to give him a heart attack, and inhumanly difficult human he had ever come across.

He had hunted and fought with full blown jaguars, poisonous snakes, a whole river filled with chomping-for-flesh alligators, but by far, she has taken over them and made them look like petals falling on the water.

And somehow, he couldn't live without her.

They stopped in front of the waterfall, the loud gushing music of thundering and rumbling aqua falling into the bottom echoed in their ears.

He felt like a waterfall. All his feelings were pushed off from a cliff and he let gravity do all the work.

The foam at the end was him- simply bubbling and waiting in anger, dreaded fear and most likely, acute sharp muscles pulling near his damn heart.

Just say it.

He chose to be approachable and gentle with this because-well, that's what his father told him to do.

Unpredictably, his father wasn't surprised. He simply tore the pamphlet of their contract and just told him flatly to break the engagement with Yuh.

When he asked why, he showed the parchment of his mother's words.

On hearing that she had been abused and finally left to die by a human who she had tried to save but unknowingly, it had been a trap to find out about the location of the red stone.

Unflinchingly, she refused to depart its existence and had been abused to an extent where she couldn't recover. They had left her in an estranged hut because she couldn't move, let alone speak anymore.

Somehow, she managed to get herself up and write on some leaf the last words to Yuri with her own blood.

Yuri,
Don't let yourself be ruled by the prejudice. All humans are not the same. It's not the race, it's the individual that make everyone different.

I'll see you soon, my love.

Yisrael realized that his mother taught them all one crucial lesson. It was unsaid and between the lines, it showed all he could do was nod and agree.

There was nothing he could say or do to avenge his mother yet after all that, his beautiful mom had imparted that one lesson they all overlooked.

It had been why Yuri hadn't killed River and Chris the first time. To make amends and show that he was doing what he can. He wasn't going to judge them just because their own race killed his wife.

He gave a chance.

He didn't know if he would be wrong or right but he gave a chance.

Just like Yisrael did. He wasn't sure if this was a win for him or a loss but it was somewhere in between. Despite everything his feelings for River only grew. Grew like a damn tree.