“I kept waiting for a reason not to stay. I’m still waiting.”
Hana is a material courier who travels the roads between Arland’s workshops and settlements, gathering rare ingredients in the field and delivering synthesized compounds between clients who cannot make the journey themselves. She is good at it in the specific way that quiet people tend to be good at solitary work: methodical, patient, and honest about what she can and cannot source. She travels alone by preference. Not because she dislikes people — she does not — but because groups require a kind of ongoing conversational performance that she finds exhausting over long distances, and because the roads through monster territory are genuinely easier to navigate when she does not have to account for anyone else’s pace.
She is from a small fishing village on the eastern coast, far enough from Arklys that most people she meets have not heard of it. She left young with a borrowed pack and a knife she was still learning to use correctly. She can use it correctly now.
Story
A Request Gone Wrong
Hana arrives in Arklys on a specific commission — a synthesized reagent her client needs that she cannot gather herself, one that requires an actual alchemist. She has been given a name and an address, and the address turns out to be a workshop above a narrow street that smells of sulfur and something sweet she cannot identify. She rehearses what to say on the walk over, the way she always does. She has the commission brief ready in her pocket and her request organized into three sentences.
The door opens before she can knock. The girl on the other side is already talking.
By the time Hana has registered that she is being asked about her name, her destination, and her opinion on a batch of something bubbling on a shelf behind the counter — simultaneously, apparently — her prepared sentences are completely gone. She manages to produce the commission brief and hold it out. Lulua takes it, reads it upside-down for a moment before correcting herself, declares that she can absolutely do this, and begins pulling things off shelves while explaining her approach at full volume.
The result is not quite right. Not wrong enough to be useless, but not what Hana specified. She leaves with it anyway because Lulua’s expression when she handed it over was so genuinely expectant that Hana could not locate the correct words to correct her. She spends the walk back to her lodging feeling flustered in a way she cannot name, and irritated at being flustered, and also faintly aware that she is thinking about going back.
Dragged Along
She goes back to say the reagent was close but needed adjusting. She has this phrasing ready. Lulua listens, nods vigorously, and announces that she is going out to gather materials and Hana should come.
Hana does not say yes. She does not appear to say no either. By the time she has located the appropriate response they are already through the city gate.
It is not uncomfortable, precisely. Lulua does not require Hana to generate conversation — she generates enough for both of them without apparent effort, pointing at plants, asking questions she does not always wait for answers to, explaining things Hana did not ask about. Hana gives short answers when she has them. Lulua responds to the short answers with the same enthusiasm she would give a long one. After a while Hana stops bracing for the moment the silence becomes uncomfortable, because the silence does not become uncomfortable. Lulua fills it and then her attention moves on, and somehow this is easier than most conversations Hana has had with people who were actively trying to include her.
In the field, Lulua is surprisingly capable. She moves with genuine purpose, knows what she is looking for, and handles herself when a monster emerges from the tree line with a composure that has nothing to do with the loudness of her personality at the workshop counter. Hana steps in without thinking, knife already out, the decision arriving after the movement rather than before it. Lulua glances back at her afterward with an expression of uncomplicated delight, as though the gesture confirms something she already knew.
They return to Arklys in the late afternoon. Hana does not have a reason to still be walking beside her by the time they reach the workshop door. She does not stop walking beside her.
Rorona’s Shadow
Rorona visits the workshop twice in the same week. She is warm and scattered and immediately, genuinely kind to Hana in a way that requires no effort and produces no expectation. She brings food both times. She calls Lulua by a nickname that makes Lulua stand slightly straighter while pretending she has not.
Hana watches Lulua around her. She is familiar with the shape of it from the inside: the small recalibration a person makes when someone they love is in the room, the way presence becomes slightly more careful, slightly more aware of itself. Lulua is cheerful and she is happy to see her mother and all of this is plainly true. It is also true that there is something Lulua is working against every time she opens the workshop, something that has nothing to do with whether Rorona is proud of her and everything to do with the fact that the pride would mean more coming from herself. Hana recognizes the feeling with the clarity of someone who has spent years performing competence in exactly the same way, for an audience of none.
She does not say any of this. What she does, without planning to, is start asking Lulua questions after Rorona leaves — about the workshop, about her techniques, about what she is working on. Not because she needs to know. Because Lulua answers them with her whole face, and watching that is something Hana cannot find a reason to stop doing.
The Riddle
Late on a quiet evening, Lulua shows her the book.
She does not make a production of it. She sets it on the counter between them while they are waiting for a synthesis to finish, and explains, with less volume than usual, that she is the only one who can read it. She says it plainly, not as a boast. She turns to a page and Hana looks at it, and what is on the page is text that Hana cannot parse and diagrams that she does not fully understand and something underneath the whole thing that she recognizes as the shape of a problem that has no clean solution yet.
She looks at it for a long time. Lulua is quiet, which is unusual enough that it registers.
“Has anyone else seen it?” Hana asks.
“Some,” Lulua says. “But they can’t read it.”
“What does it feel like to be the only one who can?”
Lulua is quiet for another moment. “Like it’s mine,” she says. “And also like I don’t know what to do with it yet.”
Hana nods slowly. The synthesis finishes. Neither of them moves to check it immediately.
She does not understand the riddle. She does not think understanding it is the point. What she understands is that Lulua handed her something she has not handed to many people, and that the quietest version of Lulua is, if anything, more interesting than the loudest one. She thinks about this more than she intends to on the walk back to her lodging.
The Weight of the Road
Word reaches her from a client two towns south: the merchant she was delivering to has lost his business. The commission is cancelled. The payment she was owed will not be coming.
She sits with the letter for a long time in her room and does the accounting. It is not good. This was not a small commission — she had structured the last two months around it, taken smaller work to keep herself in the area, turned down a route south that would have paid half as well and kept her liquid. The numbers, when she goes through them carefully, tell her she can cover lodging for another week and a half. After that she will need to take whatever work she can find immediately, which in Arklys means asking around at the docks or picking up courier runs that go nowhere she particularly wants to go. The practical path is clear and not comfortable and she knows how to do it. She has done it before, early on, when she was still learning the roads and the work was thin.
She folds the letter and sets it on the table and sits with it. She is tired in the specific way she gets when she has been competent and careful for a long time by herself and it has not been enough, and she has no one to tell about it.
She intends to handle it quietly. She goes to the workshop the next morning to pick up a completed order and does not mention it. She has decided not to mention it. She is going to pick up the order and manage her expression and think about the docks on the way back, and none of this will be Lulua’s problem.
She is there for four minutes before Lulua stops what she is doing, looks at her, and says nothing. Just stops. Sets down what she is holding.
Hana does not explain. Lulua does not ask. She makes tea, because she does things like that without being asked to, and they sit at the workbench together while the morning goes on outside. Hana is thinking about what she should do next and trying not to think about it and failing, and then she is not thinking about anything because her eyes have filled without her permission and she is angry at herself in a way that makes it worse rather than better.
Lulua does not make it strange. She just stays, the way steady things stay, and Hana cries for a few minutes and feels humiliated — genuinely, sharply humiliated, because she does not cry in front of people and she especially does not cry about money — and then feels slightly less humiliated and then feels, quietly and against her expectations, better.
“I’m sorry,” Hana says afterward.
“Don’t be,” Lulua says. Then, after a moment: “What happened?”
Hana tells her. Not all of it, and not easily, but enough — the cancelled commission, the two months she had structured around it, the accounting she has been running in her head since the letter arrived. She says it in the flat, factual way she says things she is embarrassed about.
Lulua listens without interrupting, which is not always a given. When Hana finishes she is quiet for a moment, and then she says: “I have gathering runs I’ve been putting off. North of the city, mostly — I keep meaning to go myself but I never do.” She says it the way she says most practical things: without ceremony, as though it is simply a fact she is reporting. “Better pay than dockwork. If you want them.”
Hana looks at her. The routes are real — she can tell that they are, that Lulua actually needs them done. It is also not only the routes.
“All right,” Hana says.
Staying
The practical problem does not resolve itself so much as it gets solved, which is its own thing to sit with. Lulua’s gathering routes keep her busy through the week, and the pay is good, and somewhere in the middle of the second run Hana realizes she has stopped doing the accounting in her head. The numbers are fine. She made them fine, technically, though she did not do it alone, and she is still getting used to that.
By the end of it she has enough to stay or to go, and the choice is actually a choice. She could leave on Tuesday.
She does not leave on Tuesday.
She stays through the end of the week and then through the following one, and this time she is aware that she is choosing to. She notices it each morning — that she has not left, that nothing is requiring her to be here except that she wants to be — and finds that she does not have a compelling counter-argument. The city has become familiar. The workshop has become familiar. The specific way the workshop smells and the specific radius of noise that precedes Lulua wherever she goes has become something Hana notices the absence of when it is not there.
She goes back one afternoon on a pretext — something about the order from two weeks ago, a small clarification she does not actually need — and Lulua opens the door already smiling, the way she does when she has heard footsteps she recognizes. Not the general smile she gives everyone. The specific one.
Hana has been tracking this distinction for longer than she has allowed herself to admit.
She steps inside. The workshop smells the way it always does. She has not decided anything. She is simply still here, and she thinks, without trying to be careful about it, that she would like to keep being here for a while longer. She thinks Lulua knows this. She thinks Lulua has known it for some time and has simply been waiting, cheerfully and without pressure, for Hana to catch up.
Under Open Sky
They are outside the city walls in the early evening, returning late from a gathering run, when Lulua stops walking. Not for a reason — no material to examine, no monster in the tree line. She simply stops, tilts her head back, and looks up.
The sky over Arland is clear and very large. Hana stops beside her.
“I always forget how many there are,” Lulua says, meaning the stars. She says it the way she says most things — openly, to whoever is there, without pretense — but she is not looking at the sky anymore. She is looking at Hana.
Hana is aware of this. She is aware of most things Lulua does in her proximity, has been for longer than she has been honest with herself about, and the looking is something she has catalogued and not yet addressed. She addresses it now. She reaches out and finds Lulua’s hand in the dark, which is not difficult because Lulua’s hand is already halfway to hers.
They stand there for a while. The stars are numerous. The grass is damp. Hana is not thinking about any of this.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Hana says eventually. “I kept waiting for a reason not to.”
“Did you find one?”
“No.”
Lulua smiles — she can hear it before she sees it — and then leans in, and the kiss is soft and brief and tastes faintly of whatever she was eating on the road, and Hana thinks distantly that she has been composing three-sentence speeches her whole life and none of them were necessary and this was always what she was working toward. She does not say this. She just holds Lulua’s hand a little tighter, and they walk back to the city in the dark, and the stars are still there when they go in.
Interactions
Lulua
Hana does not attach easily. She has built her working life around not needing to — around the road being a sufficient structure, the commission a sufficient purpose, arrival and departure a sufficient rhythm. Lulua does not fit inside this structure and does not seem to notice that the structure exists. She treats Hana’s short answers as complete answers. She treats Hana’s presence as a given without having been told she could. She fills silences without requiring Hana to perform in them, and somehow this is the thing that makes the silences feel safe rather than insufficient.
What Hana feels for her took a long time to name, partly because she is slow to name things and partly because she kept looking for the place it would become inconvenient. It has not become inconvenient. It has become the most uncomplicated thing about her time in Arklys, which she did not expect from something that scares her this much.
What it is like to actually be with her turns out to be different from what Hana had imagined, in the sense that she had not really imagined it — she had spent so long examining the feeling from the outside that she had no picture of the inside. The inside is: Lulua reaches for her hand the way she reaches for anything she wants, without deliberating. The inside is: being the person Lulua is talking to when she is excited about something, which is frequent, and noticing that this is a position she would not trade. The inside is: still occasionally terrifying, and also the most solid thing in her life, and she has stopped trying to work out how both of these are true simultaneously.
Rorona
Rorona is kind to Hana in a way that does not wait for permission. She brings food to the workshop when she visits and portions some out for Hana without checking whether Hana is staying, on the apparent assumption that she is. She asks questions that are easy to answer — about the roads, about which routes are clear this season, about whether Hana has eaten — and listens to the answers with her whole attention in a way that makes short answers feel like enough. Hana finds her easy to be around in the way she finds very few people easy to be around, and has spent some time trying to understand why.
What she has arrived at is that Rorona does not seem to be evaluating her. Most people, even kind people, carry some ambient sense of assessment — gauging what kind of person she is, whether she is worth the effort of sustained attention. Rorona does not appear to be doing this. She arrived at some conclusion about Hana early on and has not revisited it, and the conclusion appears to be simply that Hana belongs here. This is both deeply comfortable and faintly alarming, because Rorona reached it before Hana had reached it herself.
She has also noticed, without drawing attention to it, that Rorona has never once asked what Hana’s plans are or when she intends to leave. Hana is not sure whether this is thoughtfulness or whether Rorona simply already knows the answer.
When it becomes official, Rorona does not react with surprise. She reacts the way someone reacts when something they have been watching develop finally arrives — with a kind of exhale. The next time she visits the workshop she brings food for three without being asked, and at some point in the afternoon she takes Hana aside, briefly, and says something specific: that she has been watching Lulua for months now, that she could see the change before Lulua was talking about it, and that Lulua had been talking about it. Not always directly. But consistently enough that Rorona had a clear picture well before anything was confirmed.
“She talks about you the way she talks about things she cares about,” Rorona says. Simply, without ceremony. “I’m glad you stayed.”
Hana says thank you, which is inadequate. Rorona squeezes her arm and goes back to the workshop counter, and Hana stands there for a moment considering the fact that Lulua’s mother knew before she did. It is, on reflection, the least surprising thing about any of it.
Totori
Totori arrives in Arklys with the specific kind of ease that belongs to people who have been moving through difficult terrain for long enough that it has become ordinary. She unpacks efficiently, orients herself quickly, and identifies within approximately one afternoon which gathering routes are worth taking and which the locals are overstating. Hana notices all of this, recognizes it as the same practical literacy she has built herself, and finds the recognition unexpectedly settling — it is different from being understood by someone who likes you. It is being understood by someone who has done the same work.
They fall into a companionable rhythm on shared field runs without much discussion. Totori does not need to fill silences either, which helps. She is observant in a way that is not intrusive — she notices things and files them without commenting unless commenting would be useful — and Hana comes to trust this quality in the same way she trusts a well-made tool. Reliable. Precise. Not trying to be more than it is.
At some point Totori says something offhand about Lulua — something specific and accurate about the way she carries the weight of the workshop, said without sentiment — and Hana goes quiet in a way that is slightly longer than a normal pause. Totori does not remark on it. She simply waits, and Hana thinks that Totori has been watching longer than she has let on, and that this is neither a threat nor a tease but simply the habit of someone who has spent years paying attention to people she cares about.
Meruru
Meruru identifies the situation between Hana and Lulua approximately forty minutes after meeting Hana. She does not say anything immediately, which Hana will later understand was an act of considerable restraint on Meruru’s part, because once Meruru does say something she says quite a lot of it.
The saying-something happens during a group dinner at the workshop, at a moment when Hana passes Lulua something before Lulua has asked for it. Meruru points at this. Specifically. With enthusiasm. Hana’s face does something she would prefer it had not done, and Lulua laughs, and the whole thing is mortifying in a way Hana will eventually find funny, though not yet.
What follows is a dynamic she does not have a name for but gradually accepts: Meruru is relentlessly, cheerfully invested in the outcome in the way that people with large personalities are invested in things they have decided are good. She does not tease maliciously. She teases the way she does everything — at full volume, without subtlety, with genuine warmth underneath it. Hana finds her exhausting in exactly the proportion that she finds her endearing, which is a ratio she has come to terms with.
She is also, underneath the performance of it, perceptive. She asks Hana real questions when they are alone, the kind that require actual answers, and listens to them without the teasing edge. Hana has answered more of them than she expected to.
When it became official — when Hana and Lulua came back from outside the city walls one evening and something about them had visibly shifted — Meruru’s response was immediate, loud, and completely without surprise. She had called it. She said so. She said so more than once, across multiple days, in front of people who had not asked. Hana had known this was coming and had braced for it and it was still somehow worse than anticipated, and also, she found, not entirely unwelcome. Being seen that clearly by someone who was genuinely pleased about what they saw is not the worst thing that has happened to her in Arklys.
Abilities
Knife Work
Hana carries a single knife, and it does two jobs. In the field it comes out for gathering — cutting stems cleanly at the right angle, splitting bark without damaging what is underneath, getting into the parts of a plant that fingers cannot. She learned this use first, before the combat one, and it shows in how she holds it: low, practical, without the deliberate grip of someone trained to fight. The fighting came after, out of necessity, and she learned it the same way she learned everything else about the roads — by doing it enough times that it stopped being frightening.
She is not a remarkable fighter. She is a capable one, which is a different thing and in her line of work the more useful one. She reads terrain, she does not take engagements she cannot finish quickly, and she keeps the blade sharp because a dull knife is worse than no knife for both of its purposes. It is not a weapon she has particular feeling about. It is a tool she respects and knows well, and that has always been enough.