For some reason Willard remembered the cheery faces of the Sorissian couple before he dozed off. Bright, beaming without a care in the world, both of them blazing, like two stars beneath the gray clouds.

Twenty three. Projected death at twenty seven. How he longs for a companion.

A touch. A cuddle. An ear to whisper his vulnerabilities into. A shoulder to cry on when things get hard. Someone to share his burden. At least someone who’d stop and listen. But life goes on, and no one ever stops, each struggling against a blizzard, trying to reach the eye of the storm. Like everyone else, he’s struggling, stumbling and scrabbling forth. But both him and everyone else know, at least vaguely, that he’s lagging behind, further and further each day until he’d finally stop and be buried under the the snow. No one has ever reached out, never gave him any pushes nor pulls. On one hand he hid his decline well, and on the other he pushed away those kind enough to ask him about it.

The only person he’d ever spoken to about his worries openly was a dying hag. It had been five years ago, when he was first diagnosed with his lung condition. It was in the morning of the last Makobi-Festival, five years ago. Back then there had been less tourists, lighter skies and kinder people.

----------------------------------------

The hunched figure was dragging a giant cart behind them. They stopped as if to catch their breath, turned, and saw him. Willard recognized the hag from the very outskirts of Tak’Makahn, and raised a hand to greet her. She nodded, and returned to pulling the large cart out of the alley. He hurried forward and offered his hand but she slapped it away.

“Do not disrupt my Mara-Tafji.”

Mara-Tafji. The final pilgrimage. Willard stared at the old woman. Suddenly the wrinkles on her forehead, the creases under her eyes, and the dropping flesh below her cheeks grew deeper. Willard realized he was staring at someone’s last walk. Instinctively he took two steps back. That meant he was the witness. That meant…

“What do you ask of me?” Willard recalled the words spoken during the old Sorissian passage rites.

The hag stared at him for a while, shrugged, and set her cart down. “Your attention.”

And so the tourists gathered under the village center that day who looked up would see an usual sight—a man and a hunch-back sitting on the ridge of the slanted roof of the Sorissian chief’s dwelling. They stayed there for the entire morning, the man listening to the hunch-back’s stories. Stories of how she skinned her first Marime-Beast, of how she caught her first moose, how she got her first scar, how she fell madly in love with a Sorissian from another Tak and how she was nearly exiled for it. She talked all through the morning and deep into midday, not bothering to take off her fur coat when the sun grew unbearable. She talked about everything she remembered, from the fond moments of childhood to the bittersweet passings of her parents. She talked without looking at Willard, instead staring out into the frozen lands that lay before Tak’Makahn and Ferah, the wastelands that dwarfed even Ferah’s monolith.

“-and I’ve been living in that old shack ever since.” She chuckled, finishing another one of her stories.

Willard stared at her, his gaze his only comment. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, the hag turned her head and faced him. Her face caught Willard by surprise. It was still filled with wrinkles and drooping with loose flesh, but she seemed several decades younger. It was as if a giant burden had just been lifted. She was smiling, the same gentle smile that mother often wore as her neutral expression.

“Young man, I apologize for speaking so much,” she said, turning her face back and staring again into the bleached distance.

“…no…please don’t,” Willard said.

“It is only reasonable that I return the favor." She smiled. “Tell me about it.”

“What?”

“Tell me your story,” she said. “How it starts…and how it ends.”

“I…I really don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to the dead.”

Willard glanced at her. That warm smile was gone, and a chilling look of absolution seeped into her eyes. “I…”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Well?”

Willard’s lips drew into a thin line, and cast his gaze down and buried his chin in his arms.

“I…I have a…condition.”

“Go on.”

“Something to do with my lungs. It’s…I only have a couple of years left, at best.”

“Ho! My hubby had something similar, I think.”

Willard glanced at her, then back at his feet.

“I haven’t told anyone.”

“Hmph.”

“It’s not like I’m whining or anything…” Willard felt his arms tighten around his legs, and his little facade shattered. Why did he bother putting up with her in the first place? She would die soon. So he should at least give his truest self to her as per her request.

“I’m scared.” He looked at the tourists bustling around in the village center. Some had kids on their shoulders. Others had each other’s arms interlocked. Their children were running around with Sorissian children, giggling under the sun.

“I’m scared of losing it,” he said flatly. “Losing everything.”

“Aren’t we all,” she mused.

For a brief moment Willard had hoped she would pull him in and embrace him, a primal desire of a child seeking consolation. But she continued staring out at the things far out of his reach.

“No good,” she said. “You’re still thinking of others. Your life’s not about them, and theirs sure as hell ain’t about you.”

Although her words suffocated Willard like tiny knives digging into his chest, he knew she was right.

“I haven’t lived a full life yet.”

“No, you haven’t”

“I want to, though.”

“Naturally.”

“I want to breathe different airs. Touch different things. Kiss different people. Taste different things. Feel different winds brush against my cheeks.”

“Spoken like a true virgin,” the hag chuckled.

Willard pulled his chin out of his arms and frowned.

“Yes, you are a virgin,” the hag said. “A virgin who’s never experienced life. A virgin who does not know what is, and what will be. You see, you feel, but do you not live. A newborn, despite those years across your hands.”

Willard’s hands instinctively shrank into his sleeves.

“Let’s say you have…twenty years left.”

“Shorter.”

“Oh? ten, then…no? Seven. Let’s say you have Seven years left. What are you going to do in those years?”

“Work, like always.” Willard shrugged, “…work till I can’t anymore.”

“And what’ll happen after that?”

“I’ll die.” Spelling it out loud had more of an impact than Willard expected.

“People die everyday, son.” The hag shrugged. “They die every hour, every minute, every second. Me, I’ve lived a long, hard life. It mightn’t be fruitful, but I sure had fun. Fun that’ll be by my side when I die. You? Hardly. Doesn’t that make you sad?”

“Why do you say these things?” he finally couldn’t take it, and stood up, hands balled. “I’ve done you no wrong.”

“Young man. These words are for you, not for me,” the hag said, still staring at something far away.

“Will you look at me when you speak?”

“…I’d rather not.”

“Will you tell me your name?”

“It is…unimportant.” A touch of melancholy swam in her eyes. “You needn’t know. I am but a wayfarer in your life. Something to remind you of the crossroad you find yourself in.”

“I don’t understand. Why did you tell me those stories?”

“To show you what might’ve been.”

“What?” Willard felt hot. Maybe from the heat of the sun, but the hotness was welling up deep inside him. An irritating prickling. He glanced at his meeting place. Empty. TimeScale told him it was twenty-past-one, exactly ten minutes before the operation. She was still not there. Willard frowned.

“You’re angry, son,” she cackled. “At yourself, at them, at everything.”

“I’m not.”

“Your anger blinds you. Slow down, and you will see sense.”

It was then that Willard decided he had had enough. He’d more than fulfilled his role of the witness to her Mara-Tafji, and didn’t want to waste any more time on her now.

“I’m sure one day I will understand these words.” He bowed, remembering to call the witnesses’s final valediction.

“May death make way for peace, again, in the next life.”

The hag still had her back turned to him, staring at something in the distance when Willard slid down the side.

Two days later, while he was hammering the nails of a new yurt with a group of Sorissian youngsters, a mourning call sounded from the Hemani-Nussian church. A deep hymn that went on for one-and-a-half minute, then silent once more.