Selly stuffed her face, jamming bits of food into her mouth like she had shovels for her hands. I had gotten her a tiny amount of water on a spoon, and after she downed it in one go I got her a cup so she could scoop the water from it instead of me going back and forth constantly. Anna had denied a new mug of tea, so I, and I alone drank the tea.

Selly could really eat… I mean, she ate fast and abnormally large amounts for someone her size aught to. She used her sword to cut the egg and skewer it, scooping up the sauce with a chunk of her bread.

She moved like a food-eating machine, and for all that it was interesting, I turned to read up on earth magic and intermittently paid attention to Anna, who rested against me while reading on her own.

I was part of the way through Earth magic, reading about how certain disciplines use it to shape housing right out of the ground or shape the landscape for agriculture, when she pressed into me, and didn’t pull herself back up.

I turned to her and found her sleeping, her book still open, a finger below a page, ready to flip it. She was breathing lightly, though somewhat uncomfortably, with how she was lying limply against me.

I poked her face, with one finger, not really expecting her to complain but when I did, she felt it, and turned her head, and it slipped into her mouth, awkwardly sliding into her mouth and between her teeth.

I wanted to snicker a little, but when I went to pull it out, her teeth pressed down, not hard in a bite, but strongly enough to cause a problem.

“Oh shoot,” I mumbled to myself, reaching over to the other side of her head and around to brush against her skin, lightly. Her head turned, her mouth opening and my finger coming free.

I brushed my hand, drying it on the hem of my dress.

“I’ll be back Selly, ban, Selliban,” I bumbled.

“Mhm, go on, I won't cause a fuss.”

“Thanks, I don’t expect you to, but thanks,” I told her, both for her solemn oath and for not getting annoyed at my slip-up.

Keeping Anna up, I slipped my chair out, and moved around her, moving to lift her up and out of her chair. I slipped her out from the table and carried her over to our room, nudging the door open before I walked over and gently slid her into bed sliding the covers up and tucking her into bed.

She turned towards me, grasping through the sheet towards my arm, hers trying to wrap around mine before I managed to pull away.

Anna looked uncomfortable and rolled back over, curling up a little like she was trying to become a ball.

I sighed, knowing that I couldn’t curl up with her, and left, walking quietly before closing the door and letting Anna have her sleep.

She had been going through it all day like a soldier, trundling through the day while sore and exhausted.

I came back to the table, tucking in Anna’s chair, before sitting down in mine, making sure not to drag the wood and cause a racket.

Selly was starting to tire of filling her stomach, and her eating slowed. She was holding a bit of egg yolk like a loaf of bread, taking bites out of it.

“How do you fit it all inside of you? Where does it go?” I asked her.

“whut uu yoo meen…” she swallowed, sparing me her talking with an open mouth, “What do you mean? It goes to my belly. Obviously?”

I looked at her. Unable to determine if she was messing with me or just missing my point.

“You’ve eaten, like, three times your weight?” I asked, “If I ate that much, I would be dead. That bit of egg is almost the size of your arm, for crying out loud.”

“No, I haven’t. Just a quarter. It’ll last me today and tomorrow. Don’t worry about it,” she told me, waving off the incongruity.

“A quarter? Oh, only a quarter, silly me,” I told her.

“Eyy!” she said, “don’t go being weird about it. So, I suppose I should talk about what I’m here for on behalf of my queen. I can wait till tomorrow if you feel like it? Put it off and let you take a snooze?”

She said it with the intent to tease me about it, but I wasn’t here for that.

“If you gained like seven levels in a day, you would be tired too, you dolt.”

That shut her up right quick.

Her dainty mouth slapped closed while her eyes seemed to boggle a bit. She literally dropped the loaf of egg yolk in her hand, too stunned to speak, I could see her mouth, ‘Seven?’ before she took a breath and said it out loud.

“Seven levels? By the first… What the hell has she been doing, and how can I get in on that action? Ugh, I wish I had that problem. Forgive me… About being a total wasp about it.”

I had no idea what ‘being a total wasp about it’ meant. But I could tell she was talking about being a pain in the ass from context. She was incomprehensible, but she had the spirit, I supposed.

“Come on, then, you little wasp. Tell me your secrets before I eat the rest of the pan’s worth and send you upstairs or pin you to a corkboard to examine how you fit so much food in you,” I told her, not caring about the morbidity of my words.

“You don’t scare me. And you would be sorely worried about doing so. I’m under guest, right, and you know it,” she said pointedly.

She wasn’t wrong. I had sworn I would be a good guest… Assuming I even counted as a guest anymore and not a more permanent resident.

We had gone a bit above and beyond being hostess and guest.

You generally don’t kiss your innkeeper… Or sleep in their bed for free.

“Out with it,” I told her, “come on, I don’t have all night.”

Selly, being Selly, crouched down and picked up the hunk of egg before she started talking.

“My queen sends her regards. And wishes me to do two things for you. One is to make you your title of [Tall Friend], and to work, in place of my queen, to aid you as well as I can. She was quite insistent despite my incredulity. I am to try and help you in any way I can, for whatever reason, and if I can’t, I am to reach out to other sprites of my clan and ask them to aid you in repaying my queen’s debt to you. Though you can ask for another boon if help forever was too little upfront for your boon? You do get to pick it after all.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

That caught my ear, twice over.

A title and a boon.

I had almost forgotten, but the queen had mentioned them, swearing on in.

I had a title, though I had no idea what it really did. It was just words to me. It was still captivating however, the word [Tall Friend], sounded distinct, though not particularly over the top.

The boon, too, was interesting. Letting me ask for help with something forever? It was attractive. I could ask for something, like goods, or a service, or something else, I supposed. But what else would I ask for? A lifetime supply of honey? I had money, I could buy some… Probably. And if I couldn’t, I could probably find someone who would want to do it and ask a sprite to help them become a [Beekeeper] or [Honey Farmer]. I could ask for a specific, costly service, like… Well, I didn’t know what I could ask from them, but I could ask for it.

Instead, the queen had seen to it that I could ask for help, for some assistance.

A boon on a level with the life dept she had thought of owing me as a concession, just with no control over the sprite queen.

I was more than fine with the difference. I had no wish to have any control over anyone like that. Not one little bit. Her switching the ‘dept,’ the sprites held so important, from her life to a title and a boon that went on forever, was more than I had ever expected from helping her.

Speaking of.

“I accept. Though you’re Queen is aware that she doesn’t need to repay me… Right? I expected nothing, and was fine with it,” I reminded her.

Selly nodded, vigorously, her mouth open at the bottom of her face, cramming the egg in before pulling it in with her mouth and swallowing, there was a bulge in her neck, that rapidly lowered into her abdomen. It was like watching a snake swallow a rabbit, the bump moving far too quickly.

“Ohhh. I know,” She said, the moment the bump got below her neck, “My queen is far too good for you, In my opinion anyways. But she is an exemplar of living up to her own personal honour, and it would be beneath her to do nothing.”

She spoke with a great deal of recovery about her queen, who was basically her mother. It was touching, in a way.

I missed my mom.

I worked to hold back the pain of her loss, the weight of it standing right next to Skip and Kindly, and everyone else I had known, for how little I knew or cared about them in life.

“You’re a momma’s girl, aren’t you?” I asked her, more to distract myself than as a jab, though she ended up taking it as one.

“Wha- Why you. She’s not my mother… Well, she is, but not really! She. Is. My. Queen! My parents are none of your concern,” she said sourly.

I looked at her, a smug feeling spreading through me, twinging the corners of my lips up.

“Momma’s Girl it is,” I told her and waited for the fun to begin.

“I! I’m not!” She shouted, following it with a short, very pointed tirade. Billowing on and on.

I didn’t even pay attention, I just smiled, cackling to myself, which only set her off worse.

She was rather creative with cussing, it was quite… colourful.

She blew so hard she had to gasp air in, sometimes mid-sentence. She would say something like, “Sharp to-OOOah-thed she bitch,” and just suck in air mid-word, her face looking like she was sneezing in reverse. Her mouth opened with her head rocked back, the tiny insect mouth hidden behind her chin hinged open. To suck in as much air as possible before it snapped shut, and she opened her tiny front mouth to keep shouting.

It wasn’t even all that loud, though with every shout and motion, she was giving off the tingly scent she and her queen had. A kind of emotional cloud that made me feel a need to sneeze.

I let it go on for a good long while, egging her on when she started running low on steam, but everything came to an end eventually. It was starting to get uncreative, she wasn’t just running low on steam, but on the rest of the stuff.

She was being, had been the whole time she was here, all tense and stuff, and all the yelling was just as much a way to vent frustration as it was her being pissy at me over calling her a momma’s girl. She had been tensed the entire time, hard posture, wings out, even while eating and drinking.

I reached in and bopped her head with a finger lightly. She swatted at my hand, half-hearted, not the full force I knew she could. Her antenna pushed back towards her head, drooped under her finger, her wings folding back and in, siding under a patch of fuzzy ringed flaps of chitin on her back as she crumpled forward onto her knees and practically fell forward, pulling in into herself. A pair of arms held her while I pulled back, and another pair of arms held her face.

She made a noise like she was coughing, a choky-clipped noise.

She let out puffs of tingly pheromones. Bug scents that I couldn’t understand.

I thought for a moment that I had hurt her despite the lightness of my tap. My skill told me that the antenna on her head was a weak point, but I didn’t feel the skill go off. My head rumbled around to one time I had gotten in a scuffle with a guy and kicked him between the legs, and I started to get my head around to an apology.

I opened my mouth, holding back a sneeze when she managed to get a soft, tinkly sentence past her coughing noises.

“Don’t… Don’t talk about my mom…”

And all of that laughing, all that egging on I had done? Winding her up because she had a temper and seemed to need to vent? The smile on my face and the words on my lips turned to so much ash in my mouth. Because I knew that tone and I knew those words, I would know them anywhere.

For all I had never in my days seen a sprite cry, I had heard those words before, and I knew, just like that, that I had hurt her.

I might not have wounded her myself, but I had hurt her. It just wasn’t with physical blows. But an accidental, carelessness

And the worst part was it all made too much sense.

So many tiny clues, so many little things about her, about the situation and the way she was acting, the tension and everything.

She had said it herself.

She couldn’t go back.

And I didn’t know what to do about that.

“Oh…” I croaked, “I’m… I’m sorry for your loss.”

It was lame. Cliché. Overused and unhelpful.

I had hated those words. I still did. And them being the first words from my mouth made me want to beat my own face in.

They were worthless. For all that, they were the normal fare for those who didn’t feel the pain of your loss. They weren’t hateful or cruel… they just felt like something better left unsaid, something made for a lesser pain, a lesser loss.

They felt like the words you would tell someone when they lost a pet like they lost a keepsake.

Lost… like it was just misplaced, something you might find if you just looked hard enough.

The loss was just… too small a word for the kind of words you should use when someone had been ripped from another’s life. It just didn’t work.

There was no word for losing a part of your world, for a personal cataclysm, for the feeling of empty desolation that would hollow you out if you just let it until you were a husk. The feeling of… powerlessness Death left behind in her wake.

Time did not heal grief, it did not mend all wounds, it just left scars. Scars on top of whatever got in while it took its sweet ass time to scab over while your soul went septic. Left you no other option but to cut it out to save yourself like an infected leg.

Sorry for your loss… My condolences…

Words that you used when you had nothing else to say.

I wish I knew what to do.

In a way, I knew what had helped me, even if it hadn’t been enough. But I didn’t know that it would help.

We were acquaintances, maybe, maybe even friends. But we weren’t that kind of close. The kind of close where being vulnerable around one another felt safe. I couldn’t even offer a genuine word about her mom; I had never met her. And for all I knew that pain, I didn’t know how to say it in a way that wouldn’t sound like I was making it about me.

And that might just be worse than nothing because it made everything after it worse.

And I was supposed to be a [Saint of Death].

What a cruel fucking joke it was that I was supposed to help in this exact fucking scenario, and I couldn’t even reassure someone in pain right in front of me.

Good job, me. Good job.

I reached out a hand and let it lay near her, near her hands. Near her new sword. Pristine and white, and not the same as the one I had seen her use yesterday.

New.

Or new for her, at least.

I remembered what it felt like for the people around me, for the community I had, to simply look at me like I was looking at Selly. Unable to bring themselves to do anything.

It was one part the feeling of knowing what I would have wanted, one part knowing that I should say something that got me to say anything at all. I had nothing to say, so I spoke from the heart.

“I… I can’t say anything that will help. Nothing that can make you feel any better. Not right now. But I’m here if you need a hand, or a shoulder. Just ask, even if it’s simple, even if it’s so simple it makes you feel like it would be a waste of time, I’ll be here for it.”

And so, I sat there and waited for her to cry herself out, even though it made my nose tingle, and she didn’t shed a single tear. I waited and waited until she cried herself out, until she had no sadness left, and she was numb to the world.

I waited for her to take her hands off her face and get up or roll over, and she did, and when she did, I had a finger there for her to lean on.

She didn’t take it, but I wouldn’t force that on her either, for all that, she looked like she was a piece of porcelain that could shatter from a stiff spring breeze.

And that’s how it went.

The world outside was in spring, full of life and memories of the renewing late spring sun.

While inside, raindrops kept falling on our heads.