Ballad Of The Forgotten: Chapter 3: Part 1:

His life as a fugitive wasn’t that interesting.

For once, he was constantly lying on the bed. He couldn’t lie on his side, and he couldn’t sit properly either. The only times he could sit, hard pillows were propped up behind him, but he felt like he was sinking anyway.

He’d asked her of the current news, of any officers searching for a wounded man. She’d been surprised.

“They’re not looking for you.” So she knew. “Besides, with your beard and your constant frown, you look like you’ve aged ten years. If they look, it’d be for a member of royalty, wounded or dead, not a recovering alcoholic.”

That stung a little. He didn’t speak much after that.

He never got bed sores. Every morning she would hold him and apply an herb-infused oil onto his back, to help him deal with the constant irritation.

She wasn’t that much of a goddess as he thought. Having a constant temper, irritable and irrational sometimes, she’d snap at him if he asked some questions or a particular number of questions. This morning she’d made a face at him for asking her eleven questions back to back.

She was never really angry though. 

The thing that didn’t go over his head was why was she so scarred all over. She was not that secretive about her body, often stepping about him in the bare minimum on particularly humid days. He’d avert his eyes, but he couldn’t help getting glimpses of her bare skin. There were so many scars.

At first, he thought the reason she was so strong was that she was a farmer, tending to a farm all by herself. But these were battle scars. There were lashings all over her lower back, dropping down to her inner thighs. Some of her fingers had ring-like scars, and he didn’t understand what could have caused them. There was a scar that seemed to have entered from her back and corresponding to that was a similar scar. Almost as if she was stabbed with a great sword from behind. He wasn’t sure how did one survive such attacks.

There was another scar, starting from one of the corners of her lip, all the way through to her ear. He was terrified when he saw it at first. 

“Who are you?” he’d asked one day, out of unbridled curiosity. 

She was sitting in front of him, looking at the sky outside, doing nothing in particular. His question broke her constant stream of thoughts, and she looked down for a while.

“I am the Storyteller.”