Fugitive of Fugitives
Three weeks.
I’ve been running from them for three weeks.
I didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye. All Walker and Shiia know is that one day I just… didn’t come back.
Maybe they had the opportunity to live-- tell the Collective operatives sent after me that they had no idea where I went, that they didn’t even know who I worked for.
But they were probably killed when they couldn’t provide information on me.
That’s what I can’t stand to think about; the fact that they were probably killed because of simply being associated with me.
It would hardly be the first time, and I know for a fact it will keep happening. That’s just a reality of my life.
Nobody close to me gets to live happily. Wherever I go, death and destruction will follow soon after.
I almost want to embrace that fact; stop letting people get close. Maybe then I’ll stop getting people killed.
Maybe it will just get more killed.
I can’t say.
Aching hunger gnaws at my stomach as it once more reminds me it’s been almost a full day since I last ate.
I decide to walk up closer to the cliff’s edge, which lets me look over the pale green moorlands to the east, bathing in the starlight from thousands of stars in the night that’s soon to end.
I thought about heading west- chartering a ship and traveling out to the Alran Isles, try to hide with the privateers- but I barely have enough money to feed myself, let alone buy passage across an entire sea.
Not to mention that the Collective has considerable wealth and could just as easily buy those privateers out to kill me.
So instead, if I kept headed south, maybe I could reach Amnest? I have no idea what the presence of the Collective is that far south- if they even have that kind of reach. All I know is that I’m not safe as long as I’m within at least three hundred kilometers of Helmholtz.
Maybe I’ll never be safe. Maybe I can reach the deserts as far east as Ririn and the Collective will still be able to find me.
These people… this organization… they aren’t just a group of adventurers who have to follow laws… they’re criminals who own several nobles outright- just in the Helmholtz region alone.
How do you hide from that kind of organization? Is it even possible? How long will I be running from them?
Thousands of questions blaze through my mind, but I can’t find a reasonable answer to a single one of them. They all just gather in the back of my mind, questioning whether I should just make it easier on myself and turn myself in.
Maybe if I did that, they’d find it in themselves to kill me quickly.
Who knows?
The section of cliffside I’m standing on has a steep enough ledge for me to take a seat with my legs dangling over the moors.
It feels peaceful here. No glowing city torchlights in the distance, no roads with people crossing from one region to another… just open, deserted moors.
If I hadn’t known that the moors were full of terrifying monsters that roamed during the day, I might have been tempted to go wander there for a while before continuing my trek down south. But with daybreak mere hours away, I knew it would most likely end poorly, and with me being left dead on the grass, with not a single person to find me to bury my body.
Maybe if I manage to shake the Collective off my trail, I can come back up here, maybe settle down in an area of the moors. Surely there’d have to be some way of keeping the monsters away, right? This place must’ve been inhabited at some point, so how did they do it?
I lean to my left and rest against the tree that stands there, overlooking the moorlands.
“Is this something you saw happening, mama? Did you see me screwing up what you’d given to me in such a spectacular way?”
I ask that question absent-mindedly, out loud. Openly asking if she’d foreseen the life I’d come to live; a life rooted in failure.
Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she saw something in me that I have yet to see.
I always hated it when she and everyone else called me a “prodigy”. I never felt like that label was appropriate for someone like me.
Especially someone born a Katari.
Everyone was always quick to assume I was a failure, but the second I showed any measure of skill, it always changed their mind; suddenly I was “worth something” to them.
Even now, people assume I’m inherently evil, or that I’m going to do something bad, just because I’m a Katari. It’s not as open, but I know it’s still there.
People like Walter, Shiia, the Collective; they almost let me believe that stigma was starting to fade, but whenever I returned to Helmholtz, that reality always came back to slap me in the face.
It was probably never going to leave, and I was always going to be treated as “evil” at face value.
I can’t help but feel despaired by that fact. That I wasn’t ever going to be fully rid of that stigma, and that one girl alone wasn’t going to change it in her lifetime.
I once held strong, determined hope that I could, but I lost that hope when I grew old enough to realize how the world operates.
Maybe it’ll happen. I just… don’t think I’ll live to see that day.
One last time, I look up at the night sky, the light of the stars, and the twin moons beaming down to the ground.
“Maybe it wouldn’t happen in my lifetime… but maybe another.”
That prospect… it leaves me wondering if it was right to have that dream. To have a child of my own and to hope that once they grew old enough to know what life was like… maybe they’d be able to live it without the stigma of the Katari life that I’ve lived.
Would it even be right for me to have a child? What if I’d failed in my quest and they grew up in a world that hated them just as much as the world I’d grown up in hated me? Would I be able to live with the guilt of knowingly doing that to another living being?
What even is the point of wondering all this? Why should I contemplate the life of someone who will come after me if I can’t even say for certain I’ll live that long to find out?
I can’t help but ask myself more and more questions as I feel myself falling asleep against the tree I’d been leaning on for a while now.
Finally, I let myself fall unconscious as I let the worries of the future leave my mind.
I’ll cross that bridge, should I ever live to come to it.















