“Miria?” asked my mother.

I looked at my mother, who was sitting in the grass next to the dirt. Her eyes were clearer than usual. It didn’t look like she was completely here - but she looked more lucid than she had in months.

“Mama?” I asked. I felt a twinge of anxiety crawl down my spine and towards the tips of my fingers and toes.

I had dragged my mother out of the city while she was still asleep, without informing her beforehand. I had done so to keep her alive - after all, from what I had heard of the oncoming army, they would probably treat the city very poorly if it fell. And I would have consulted with my mother about leaving the city - I had tried to talk to her about it numerous times. But she had been high out of her mind, and hadn’t really been able to process the information.

In other words, it would make perfect sense if she was angry that I had dragged her out of the city while she was still asleep.

“Where are we?” she asked. She looked at our surroundings and frowned, as if trying to figure out why she wasn’t in her room anymore.

“The war is going… poorly,” I said, trying to disguise how nervous I felt. If my mother blew up, I wouldn’t necessarily think she was wrong to do so - but if she flipped out frequently while we were on the road, it would make an already potentially dangerous journey worse. If that happened, I would need to find a way to deal with it - I couldn’t let my mother’s actions put the rest of the group in danger. But I also wasn’t quite sure how I would handle it. Would I need to escort my mother back to the city, and then catch up to Old Mo’s group somehow, if she insisted on returning to our wreckage of a life in the city? Would I need to just carry her all the way to Damilius? I wasn’t sure yet.

I swallowed my anxiety and my hesitation, and met my mother’s eyes, before I continued speaking.

“Old Mo offered to take me with him when he fled. The coalition army isn’t treating the town they captured well. I don’t want to die. I… I don’t want you to die either.”

“So that’s where the city went? We’re running away?” My mother’s voice was ephemeral and hazy, as if she was only half-processing our conversation. It almost felt like she was drunk, or half-asleep. She seemed to have a hard time understanding exactly what words she was repeating.

“Yes. We’re running. We’ll reach a new city soon, and then…” And then you can get the help you need, I hope.

I didn’t say the last words. My mother hadn’t taken to the topic of quitting very well the last time I had raised it. But I still hoped that she could quit, and that things would get better afterwards.

My mother’s eyes seemed to clear up a bit more as she looked at our surroundings.

“Old Mo. You mentioned him once or twice before… isn’t he a baker? Was that a dream?”

My mother frowned, before scanning all of the other people who had fled the city with us.

Anise’s mother tightly held on to Anise’s hand while curling her other, metal hand into a fist, as if prepared to beat my mother up if she made a move towards Anise. Anise’s father had his hand curled around the gun Old Mo had given him - although there was no ammunition in the gun, making it an entirely fruitless gesture.

Sallia’s parents weren’t quite as protective of her - but even so, the three of them stood together as if ready to respond to any emergencies caused by my mother waking up.

My mother’s gaze settled on Old Mo, and Old Mo stared back at my mother. He didn’t say anything, and his expression didn’t change, but I somehow felt like his eyes radiated disapproval.

My mother looked at the two families, and then looked at me, and started laughing wildly. I felt confused as I listened to her laugh - it sounded like the grating sound of a lunatic laughing, and for a moment, I started preparing a renewal spell to see if it could maybe piece together whatever had broken inside of her mind. However, before I could start throwing magic at her, my mother’s wild laughter cut off, replaced with a giggle that sounded halfway between a hiccup and a sob.

“Leaving the city makes sense. I just don’t know where I’m going to get…” My mother shook her head, and then checked her pockets. I suspected she was looking for Fizz. Then, she hiccup-laughed again. “I… really haven’t been a good mother, have I?” she said. “I didn’t even know the war was going poorly, and you… you already prepared an escape route. You have guns. Tents. Supplies… it must have been hard for you to prepare all of this. Most parents would handle this, but you did it all on your own.” My mother’s gaze turned a bit sad. “I’m really… not a good parent.”

I opened my mouth to say.. something. To refute her, or encourage her, or something like that. but I couldn’t think of what to say when I opened my mouth.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I understood that addictions were hard to fight.

I understood that life had probably been very hard for my mother. She had probably suffered a lot before reaching this point.

I was mentally an adult, and I understood that things just went horribly, horribly wrong in life. Things didn’t always turned out the way one thought they would.

But at the same time, I couldn’t say that my mother had been a good mother. She forgot to feed me often, and I had been on the brink of starvation when I had regained full control of my body. She was addicted to drugs, and showed no interest in stopping them. She was emotionally distant, and I usually didn’t have a chance to interact with the real her for months on end, because she only returned home when she was high out of her mind. My mother was physically present, but she had basically never once been there when I needed her.

A part of me still loved her. She was my mother, and nothing she said or did would change that.

But I couldn’t deny that I had been hurt by her a lot. I tried so hard not to compare my mother in this life to my other sets of parents - but it was so hard. I loved all of my parents - I didn’t think I had it in me to truly hate a friend or family member, regardless of what happened. But a big part of me wished it was as easy to handle my mother in this life as my previous two sets of parents had been. My mother in the world of the black sun had been overprotective, but I had never once doubted that she loved me and wanted the best for me. My parents on the island world had been willing to support almost everything I did, even when I wanted to be a fisherwoman and hunt giant fish with non-euclidean geometry. They hadn’t even said anything when I trained with Sallia, one of the ‘weakest’ kids on the island, and Felix, a trainee hunter.

Thinking about how much my previous two sets of parents had obviously cared about me, and then comparing it with my mother in this life, who often forgot I existed, hurt.

“Why did you bring me out?” asked my mother. She looked my straight in the eyes. Right now, her eyes were the most clear and lucid I had ever seen them.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” I said. “I… I just… I don’t think that the army would treat you well, if the city fell. And I was leaving, and all of my friends were leaving… and I just felt that leaving you behind was wrong. I wanted to tell you about it, and get your opinion…”

“But I was never present?” asked my mother. There was a bitter edge to her words, and for a moment, it felt like she was about to flare up. but then, miraculously, she took a deep breath. She looked at Sallia and Anise’s parents, and seemed to think about something.

My mother looked at Old Mo, hesitated, and then nodded at him. “You’re the one who let her join you while fleeing? Thank you for looking after my daughter.”

“Someone had to,” said Old Mo, his voice flat and cold.

My mother flinched at that.

She shivered for a moment, and then turned to look at me again.

“I…” my mother simply stared at me, at a loss for words. For a moment, she fell into an awkward silence.

Old Mo, however, seemed genuinely pissed off.

“While you were high, your daughter nearly starved to death. I looked after her and kept her alive while you did nothing.”

My mother, who had been repressing her anger a few moments ago, seemed to snap. “You don’t know a damn thing about me. I may not have looked after Miria all this time, but at least I kept her alive for the first couple years of her life. I worked doing things I didn’t want to do because I had no choice. I had no hope for a better future. I don’t need someone who owned their own business to lecture me about looking after my daughter. I might not have done the best job, but I did the best I could.”

“You can’t tell me you really believe that,” said Old Mo. His voice was still cold and flat. “She was on the verge of starvation when I first saw her. I know you’re addicted to Fizz, and I know Fizz is cheap. But surely if you could afford Fizz, you could have at least given her a bit of food, too? If nothing else, at least that-”

“You don’t get to tell me how to live my life, or my daughter’s life! Unless you think you’re Miria’s father, how we live has nothing to do with you!” My mother snapped.

Old Mo simply gave my mother a flat, expressionless stare. I hesitated. I didn’t think this conversation was going to be very… productive from this point onwards. I was surprised to see Old Mo so angry about how my mother had treated me, but in a way, I felt warm. Old Mo really did seem to treat me kind of like a daughter. I appreciated his thoughts.

But this argument probably wouldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t think confronting my mother like this was likely to help her.

“We should eat faster,” I said. “We’ll need to get moving soon.”

Old Mo glanced at me, and then took a deep breath, before calming down. My mother looked like she was about to say something else, but after seeing Old Mo closing his mouth and turning back towards our half-finished lunches, she swallowed her words and then looked somewhere else.

I quietly pulled out a meal for my mother and put it in front of her, and she quickly stuffed the hardtack-like food into her mouth, before wincing as she tried to chew it.

The group fell into an awkward silence as people focused on their meals for a few minutes. I ate quickly and finished early, before I habitually activated my soul-sight and started scanning our surroundings.

What I saw made me leap to my feet.

I said.

“There are people coming,” Felix said, as he ‘frowned in thought’ and did his best to look suitably concerned. “Less than thirty, coming from that direction.”

Old Mo frowned, looking at his meal, before glancing at the direction Felix had pointed towards. “They’re coming from the city we left?” he said, after a few moments. Old Mo’s hand dipped into his sleeves for a moment, before a gun appeared in his hand.

“How far away?” he asked.

“Maybe… half an hour of slow-walking?” Felix said.

“Get everything packed up. We need to move,” he said.