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Farin flashes me a dazzling smile. “Are you telling me you never lie?”
My lips falter, and I go back to eating my boar. Rather, attempting to eat my boar.
“You think you actually would have had a chance with her?” I ask, giving in to my incessant need to fill the silence. I might be in the presence of a psychopath, but it’s still better to keep him talking.
I’m pretty sure moments of contemplation are when all the violent ideas come to people like Farin.
“Why? You don’t?” He flashes me that handsome smile again, the one he has to know he possesses, and I feel my cheeks heat. I promptly blame it on the fire underneath the boar.
“She loves Nox, not you.”
Farin’s smile remains, though it appears effortful now. “Nox was the first male to see her for what she is and love her despite it. Of course, she developed feelings for him. That doesn’t mean the two of them are right for each other.”
“Oh, but you are right for her,” I say.
He shrugs. “Blaise and I are the same. She simply doesn’t wish to admit it to herself.”
“And how are you the same?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because someone had the audacity to stab me, and I’d like a distraction as recompense.”
“A distraction, eh?” Farin’s eyes twinkle.
Again, I flush—stupid cheeks—but I level him a glare. “You were just talking about Blaise, the girl you claim to adore enough to cross realms for, and now you’re flirting with me.”
His face is unreadable, but he goes back to answering my original question. “I suppose it’s the least I can do. Blaise is the type who’s willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants. She loves unconditionally, but she does so within a hierarchy. The people who outweigh the others get preference, and she’d do anything to keep them. Blaise’s life has been shrouded in darkness, but her light comes from within. She can take whatever situation she’s in and pretend it’s something else, a better version of her life. Nox doesn’t understand that about her. His mind is practical, and he only sees what’s real, tangible. He doesn’t see the beauty in pretending.”
I chew absentmindedly on my boar bone, and between bites say, “Sounds like that’s exactly what makes him better for her than you.”
Farin’s ears flick. “All it means is that he doesn’t understand her.”
I shrug. “Or maybe he understands her better than anyone else. Not because he thinks the same way she thinks, but that he can see her for what she truly is, even in ways she doesn’t understand herself. Maybe being able to dream the pain away has its benefits, but maybe Blaise doesn’t need someone who pretends. Maybe she needs someone to anchor her, someone to ground her to reality and help her face whatever it is her mind is trying so desperately to run away from.”
Farin shifts, and for a moment I wonder if this was a stupid topic to broach. An image of Farin picking at my burns just to reopen my wound flashes through my mind. Nox did say that Farin gets a high off the pain of others.
But if Farin has an aching desire to make me scream in pain, he doesn’t act on it.
“So that’s the type of person you would have me be with, then?” he asks. “Someone practical. Someone who doesn’t have their head in other worlds?”
My blood chills, but I don’t answer him.
My lack of reply seems to please him, and he says, “If you get bored, I wouldn’t mind hearing about them, you know.”
I scoff, then immediately wince, grabbing instinctively at my wounded belly.
“I’d hate to give you more fodder for your imagination,” I say. “It seems like a rather dangerous place.”
He shrugs. “It is what got me into this mess to begin with. Though, I suppose it might have saved me too. That’s the thing about pivotal moments. Did they bring disaster, or did they save you from something much, much worse? I suppose we’ll never truly know, just have to wonder.”
An aching hits me. The same one that tugged on my heart when Nox told me that Farin had once belonged to another world. Not this one, or the one Nox and I are originally from, but another realm entirely. Farin’s a realm-walker. Like me.
“The strangest part is the way the air feels different,” I whisper.
Farin shakes his head where it’s propped against the cave wall and stares out into the distance. “I disagree. I think it’s the way your muscles never seem to work the same in the different worlds. When I crossed from the Nether to Alondria, it was as if my muscles turned from lead to as light as a feather. Then here, I feel as though they’re weak again.”
I level a glare at him.
