It's been eight months since I started living in Ozari's cabin. While it was a nice respite from the constant danger at first, I'm now utterly sick of it.

"Hi?"

Ozari looks up from his boots. Nice leather, those.

"What?" Ozari is very much the silent, stoic type of guy. Curt, too.

"Can I come with?"

Ozari makes a strange face, like he's just discovered a gigantic pile of rotten eggs, stashed somewhere deep in his pantry.

"No."

Oh, boy. I guess it comes down to this after all. During my time in this cabin, I learned a little about the "magic" of this world. Well, it's not magic, it's Skills. Two months ago, Xeno told me that there are other sources of Skills, aside from him. These sources aren't sentient - him and Mari, the Goddess of light and prosperity, are the only real "gods" in this world. The talented can unknowingly make connections with these sources - these manifest in the real world through Skills. Since the sources aren't sentient, some people believe that they are manifesting magic from something called mana, while others believe that they draw their powers from gods. Well, it's not called mana, it's called dori, but mana is the English equivalent. Anyway, I know that Ozari himself has a skill - a connection with the source of life. This skill lets him draw on the power of the life around him: the more life there is, the more agile he gets. Ozari is also a firm believer of the Goddess of life and nature.

"So, I know a little magic..."

"Okay?"

"It'll let me stay hidden."

He tilts his head at that and frowns.

"Jester's magic?"

"Yeah."

Well, it's not Jester's magic, but no point in stirring up a hornet's nest, y'know?

"Specifically?"

"It lets me avoid notice."

He rubs his chin and thinks. Ha, got you now! I remember him complaining that some game was "too damn sneaky." I'm like, the perfect counter for that!

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"No."

What?

"Why?"

"I will not endanger royalty. That would go against my oath."

"But I just told you, I won't be in danger! I can hide!"

"...Show me."

I leave the room, pull on the connection representing Disguise, and open the window, jumping outside. I circle around the building, re-entering from the front. He looks like he's waiting for something. Of course he does: he still thinks I'm in the house. I tap him on the shoulder. He whirls around, pulling his knife out of his cover, before realizing it's me. He resheaths his knife.

"A little violent there, aren't we?"

"You do not know what these woods are like."

His flat stare bores into my eyes.

"Come with me."

As I follow him out, I get lost in thought for a bit. 'I will not endanger royalty. That would go against my oath.' Rangers don't make oaths to protect royalty, that's a knight thing, or so I've been told. So, what happened here? I look back in my memories. Ozari ... has never really talked about himself. He's talked about me a lot, though. Or at least, about Zenith. Zenith has been in a coma since the day he was born. When the court shaman inspected baby Zenith, he found that the baby possessed no soul. Thus, I was placed in a fancy white gown of recovery and left ... alone, with a nurse coming by every hour or so to ... magically feed me? I didn't fully get the details on that bit, but if I didn't wake up before I was five, I was to be executed for "being a stain on the lineage of Kings". For some reason, that doesn't bother me as much as it should.

I don't know. Why did I die? Living one moment, dead the next. I had a plan. A way I was going to live. And then life just went right on ahead and rent my soul from my body. So, you know, I think I've learned a valuable lesson from this, and it's that when life hands you giant piles of shit, you can't do anything but take it with a smile.

Seriously, I could die at any moment. Maybe I trip over a root and break my neck. Maybe a panther jumps out of the trees and claws my face off.

...Maybe I just die, for no reason at all. I have to admit, that really irks me. The fact that I could be the safest person in the world, do everything in my power, to live, and still just randomly die. Ugh. This is not healthy, this, right here. I need to stop, before I actually trip over a root and die.

Thinking so, I pull myself back out of the clouds, to find that my legs are fairly sore. We've walked for quite a bit. Ozari's staring off into the distance. His bow is drawn tight, and the arrow's pointing wherever he's looking at. I try to peer into the distance, but I can't see whatever he's looking at. Suddenly, he lets go of the drawsting, and the arrow takes flight. It goes far, before causing blood to erupt from thin air.

I gawk.

What the fuck?

A deer shimmers into existence, neck pierced by the arrow. At first glance, it looks majestic. Tall, sleek...

...dead...

I kinda sympathize with this deer a little. It was just feeding. Maybe it had deerlings. And now it's dead. It didn't even know how it died, kinda like me. I feel this strange mixture of pity, of anger, and of sorrow that I'm not entirely sure how to decipher.

I wince. Ozari looks back at me.

"Too much, princeling?"

I need to face this. In this fucked up world, death is unpredictable. I could die in an hour. In a minute. Even in a second. Maybe it'll be a year from now. Perhaps two. Maybe eighty. But I'll die all the same. I can't stop it.

I can't dodge it.

I can't hide from it.

All I can do is suck it up, and live. Live, not knowing how I'll die. Live, with no guarantee of tomorrow.

Because that's just life.