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Once we were there, his face softened. He looked at the sky and realized that the sun was going down. He grabbed the stick and entered the woods.
As I followed him, I tried to reach the guy again, but he was too focused to remember that I was here with him and that this was only a memory.
Until he reached a little clearing, he did not stop. Once he did, he looked around anxiously for a while, searching his surroundings as though he had hoped to find something other than the trees, grass, and green bushes.
I did not know what he was searching for, at first. But as he collapsed to the ground to rest while still exploring his surroundings, I saw it.
Someone had been here. A trail leading out of the little clearing struck my attention first. There were single footsteps following one another, and just beside it, a line appeared and disappeared as though someone was pulling a broken leg using a stick. When I looked closer, I saw the mark the stick had left behind.
It wasn’t easy to spot, but the trail led into the forest. There were branches that had been broken where it passed.
The guy did not see any of this. I knew it as his gaze darted past the trail and focused on our surroundings.
“Where did you go?” He asked, mostly to himself.
“The trail goes that way,” I told him.
I could follow the trail to the end of the little clearing we were on. The tracks went under a big tree with branches reaching the ground.
It took him a while, but finally, he looked up. “Where?”
I pointed.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
He did not move.
“Should we try to follow it?” I asked. “I can help.”
He gave me an incredulous look. At once, my cheeks burned with embarrassment.
We could not. If he hadn’t known to follow the trail back then, there was no way for us to change this memory. I wasn’t actually here to help him.
“This isn’t what I did,” he said, although he could read my thoughts and wanted to answer them. “I called out her name.”
“Why are we in this memory?” I asked him. “It doesn’t seem... So bad.”
“She was hurt,” the guy replied. “She must have thought I abandoned her. She must have died. Or...”
“Or she is a monster now, too,” I said. “This is the trials.”
“How do you know that?” He asked, looking up to meet my eyes as he kept sitting on the ground.
“I was here,” I told him. “I received the call at the end of the trials.”
“And yet, she didn’t turn you?” He asked.
“No,” I replied. “I resisted the call.”
“How?” He asked. “How could that be possible?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But the trials are over. We found out the truth and told everyone. At least everyone in the Unseelie Kingdom... The Seelie... The queen still rules over them.”
“She’s been torturing me ever since,” he said. “Is that what she does to all the monsters?”
He had asked the question with the voice of a child.
“No,” I replied, feeling cruel for not lying to him. “She uses the others to attack her enemies. She uses them to scare her subjects. She...”
