They were halfway back to the cottage when the pair of girls who clung to Varus’s horns and sat upon his shoulders finally began to run out of power in their voices to repeat the alphabet song that he’d taught them while assisting them with their reading. When they put special vocal emphasis on ‘P is for Papa’ and Lithia gave him a cocky, knowing little smile, even Varus could not miss it.

  “You know, we could just use magic and get back to the cottage that much sooner.” Lithia suggested when he moved them to his chest so that they were ‘cradled’ in his arms. “They’re from magic species, with a little extra mana expended, you could make a dead sprint and the wind wouldn’t even muss a hair on their heads.”

  “Perhaps.” Varus answered.

  “It would mean you could get back to work sooner.” She added, but that damnable little smile on her face when she looked up at him from his side told him she was not expecting an affirmative answer.

  “I suddenly find myself…minding the interruptions a little bit less.” I answered. Things might have settled there, with a cocky, ‘I know something you don’t know’ smile on Lithia’s face and a quiet breeze rustling the grass beneath their feet, but there was something else on Varus’s mind. A question which tapped at his mind like a persistent, nay, stubborn guest tapping on his front door that simply would not go away.

  “How did you know I was going to come looking for you? Do you have some sort of talent for foresight? Can you see potential tomorrows in visions as the prophets of flame are said to do?” Varus asked with an inquisitive tilt of his head.

  Lithia’s bosom shook as she let out a long, lilting laugh that rang out over the long green fields with the charm and beauty of a birdsong. Varus did not stop looking down at her as he waited for her reply, and so when she finally stopped, she reached out with her free hand and touched the dark robe over his skeletal arm. Her fingers traced over the faint hue of magic symbols, and in that moment Varus ceased his steady walk to stand still instead.

  To his surprise, the smile was gone from Lithia’s face and a well of tears were suspended in the endless pools of blue which made up her eyes. “The same way I knew you’d stop right then. The same way I knew they,” she ran her hand over the heads of the two girls and briefly caused them to stir in his arms before they went still again, “didn’t want to be pulled away from you.”

  It wasn’t an answer, and so Varus did not pretend it was. He remained quiet while she looked at the sleeping pair, “I don’t have a special power. I have no skill with prophecy, thank the dark mother.” She shivered at the thought, and Varus didn’t blame her. Prophets were supposed to suffer terrible pain in plucking visions of the future and pulling them to the present, “I’m just,” Lithia hesitated and reached up to rub the back of her head, “good at reading people. I don’t have a lot of magic, I’m really, really good with a sword,” her face blushed a little as she recalled the brief disaster that was her clash with Varus, “but I’m really, really, really good at telling what others feel. I saw it with the way they looked at you, and I saw it in the way you looked at them.”

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

  “I have no face to read. So how?” Varus asked, his words were more gentle than the intensity of his stare, and yet she neither shed her welled up tears nor averted her gaze from his blood red eyes.

  “You looked at them longer than anything you owned, you looked at them like… like those papers I’ve seen you writing on. You took time from what I knew you loved, to look after the things they needed. Nobody does that for things they don’t care about, or things they consider a burden. It was just,” she exhaled hard and let her hands fall at her side to clap firmly against her thighs, “obvious to me. That’s why I can talk to you like this, too. Because I knew within a few minutes of talking, that you aren’t a bad undead.” She sniffled, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and chuckled just a little, “Even if I had a hard time believing you were actually a legendary hero, once upon a time.”

  “It’s even easier with children. They look at you with adoration. When they sang the ‘Papa’ part of that song you taught them, who do you think that emphasis was for?” Lithia blinked rapidly several times as Varus struggled for words, “Not their own parents. They’d have been crying if that were the case, since those are lost. It was for you. Whatever they left behind, whatever made them run away and find their place in your little cottage, they don’t want to go. You make them feel safe, you make them feel happy. And I knew you didn’t really want them to go. Not really. That’s why I just had us set up camp and wait. I knew we’d be going back to your cottage before long. I know I’m not-” She hesitated, her eyes went down to the ground, seemingly focused on the tops of her leather boots and her voice became thick with humility, “I’m not the smartest person. I’ve been called a dummy or an idiot more times than I can count…and that was even one of the jokes I got stung with,” she let loose a bitter snort, “but I can see love, care, tenderness, trust, and hurt in everyone around me. Even in people who used to make fun of me for not being so smart.”

  Varus could not help himself. He shifted Hannah over to his opposite shoulder, then reached out and rested a skeletal hand atop the head of the slender young valkyrie that once came to slay him. “You say that, but I have lived five thousand years and not learned what you knew before you passed twenty-five. From where I stand, adventurer, you may well be the smartest person I have ever known. Thank you.” He said, and took a step that was promptly halted when he felt her hand on his arm again.

  “Don’t call me ‘adventurer’ just call me ‘Lithia’. That’s my name after all, and like my favorite writer once wrote, ‘Friends and those who would be friends, should use each other’s names’ right?” With that inviting, welcome, open smile on her face it was impossible for even an ancient Elder Lich to refuse her.

  “Thank you, Lithia.” He said, emphasizing her name, and with that, he resumed the walk home, happier than he had been in days.