Arlette Faredin wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to run. But it didn’t matter what she wanted; her body wouldn’t listen to her mind. It was paralyzed by the sight of this nightmare from her past.

The door swung open and the man strode in, confident and in control. Dressed in armor from the shoulders down, with a strong, handsome face and wavy blond hair, he was every bit the knight in shining armor he’d been all those years ago, just on the mature end now. But that heartthrob appearance held no sway over Arlette. She knew what the man really was.

Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, the man walked closer and closer, enjoying the sight of her panic. His blue eyes pierced through her, peeling away at her defenses, his gaze reopening wounds she’d thought had been healed for good. It was like she was a child again, powerless before him, and he knew it.

“Did you enjoy playing mercenary these last few years?” he asked.

“Sebastian!” She spat out the name like piece of rotten fruit, but he only smiled in return.

“Did you miss me?” he asked with a chuckle as he stood over her trembling form. “I sure missed you, princess. I wanted to reintroduce myself so many times over the years, but it just never felt right, you know? After all, it wouldn’t be enough to simply kill you. After what you did, I need to watch you crumble first. So I’ve waited all these years for the proper time, and here we are! Almost everybody you’ve ever cared about is dead and gone. You have nowhere to run. There’s no handholds left to grab onto this time, princess. This time, you’re falling all the way down, and you get to know that I was the one that pushed you.”

A derisive laugh from the opposite corner bounced off the cell walls. “Ooooooh, sooooo scary!” mocked Basilli.

“Basilli, no!” Arlette cried.

“Cut the shit. I don’t know what history you and Boss have, but we all know that’s not what’s going on here. You want the bounty, same as everybody else. You just want to stroke your ego first, that’s all. I’m sure you feel like a real man, standing over a person in chains like that. Real big shot.”

Sebastian’s face grew dark as he turned away from Arlette and moved towards Basilli.

“Sebastian, no, please!” Arlette begged her captor. “Your quarrel is with me, right? You hate me, right? He’s nothing! He’s not important!”

“The man has a point, princess,” Sebastian replied as he stalked over to Basilli, who stared at him defiantly. “I can’t have you thinking I only care about money and privilege. I’m sure you know that the bounty is only for presenting all three of you alive.” Suddenly his hands shot out, grabbing the surprised Observer’s head with surprising speed.

“Hey wai-” was all Basilli could muster before Sebastian roughly twisted Basilli’s head around, far past the point a human neck could turn. A sickening snap resounded throughout the room. Basilli’s body went limp, and a shocked silence fell upon the prisoners. Then the cell exploded with noise. Sofie screamed and wailed. Metal clanked and rattled as Jaquet fought mightily against his abundant restraints, muffled roars of rage coming from behind the metal covering his mouth.

“You fucking bastard!” Arlette cried, a helpless rage overflowing from her soul. She tugged at her chains with all her might, but they would not budge. She was powerless, unable to do anything but watch as he tore her life apart. Just like he had before.

“I hope that clears up any confusion,” the large man sneered. He motioned to several others outside. “Take care of this trash.”

Arlette wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. Her gaze wouldn’t leave her dead companion’s face. Basilli’s head hung at an unnatural angle, his dead, glassy eyes staring at her, almost as if blaming her for his death. Her whole body shuddered under his silent accusation.

Two others entered the cell and freed Basilli’s body from its shackles, before dragging the corpse from the room.

“It’s a real shame that I won’t be able to witness your death firsthand, but I have other responsibilities. I’m sure you understand,” Sebastian said with a contemptuous grin as he casually strode back to the cell door. “There’s a storm brewing, princess. Shame you won’t be around to see it.”

The door closed. On the other side of the cell, Sofie continued to weep loudly. Jaquet was still struggling with the mass of metal holding him down, making no progress but plenty of noise. But Arlette didn’t hear any of that. All she could hear was Sebastian’s haunting laughter echoing down the stairwell.

A cold, damp breeze blew through the fog, giving Arlette’s legs goosebumps. She sat against the withered tree again. The gnarled trunk was cold to the touch, chilling Arlette to the core. Arlette sat in silence, her legs pulled up into her chest and her head buried into her knees. Eventually an annoyed sigh came from her side.

“Did you just call me here to watch you feel bad for yourself?” Peko asked. “Because anybody can do that.”

Arlette didn’t say anything.

“I’m serious. Remember back when you were a kid, and we got to have fun together? We’d talk about anything and everything. We’d run through the plains before dinner. We’d tease the farm animals. Those were good times. Now all I do it sit and wait for something bad to happen to you, so I can tell you to stop beating yourself up about it. Then you ignore me and do it anyway, and we repeat the process the next time something happens.”

Arlette finally reacted, her head turning to face the imaginary man beside her.

“Oh, did I hit a nerve? That’s because you know I’m right. And while we’re talking about things that I’m right about, let’s get this over with. This wasn’t your fault any more than what Sebastian did back then. Basilli brought that on himself.”

“No,” Arlette said mournfully, “he killed Basilli because of me. He killed him because he wanted to hurt me. He killed Basilli because he knew I cared.”

“That’s... a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?”

“You know just as well as I do how Sebastian is. You saw the hate in his eyes. He wanted to make me suffer.”

“So, what, because some asshole is mad at you, anything he does is your fault? Get out of here. What are you going to do, never have another friend in your life? You going to split with Jaquet after all these years?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Arlette admitted. “I don’t even know if it matters. We’re all going to die soon anyway.”

“Don’t give up just yet. It’s a long way to Xoginia. You never know what could happen. You’ve gotten through plenty of tough scrapes before.”

“This isn’t like those other times. Sebastian doesn’t make mistakes.”

Arlette, Sofie, and Pari sat inside a wagon, bound in chains like before. Outside, the convoy thundered north through the Eterian heartland. Axles squeaked and wooden wheels rattled. Garoph hooves pounded the dirt and vekkel claws ripped into the soil. The clicks and clacks of over thirty men and women clad in armor riding alongside the several wagons filled the air. Inside, however, it was relatively quiet, the silence of the defeated having fallen over the three.

Some time after Sebastian’s departure, several people had entered and dosed them all with the same powder that had knocked them out before. They’d woken up in a wagon already in transit, with Jaquet strapped in to a reinforced wagon all his own. Not one of them had spoken since.

Arlette remained lost in her thoughts. She felt completely and utterly demoralized by the events of the recent past. First the psychological trauma of the vision had drowned her in overwhelming waves of terror, then a ghost from her past had appeared out of nowhere to inflict crippling emotional pain upon her, and to top it all off, everything she’d accomplished since the destruction of Zrukhora had been undone. She’d lost. That was all there was to it. She’d lost and Sebastian had won, like always. The thought left her empty.

Sofie, on the other hand, seemed to be overflowing with emotion. She hadn’t stopped weeping since Basilli’s death. She seemed to be a bundle of grief forever unraveling. Arlette recognized those overflowing emotions. The young woman had seen plenty of death since joining up with Arlette, but this was the first time somebody she’d known had lost their life. The girl had always seemed lukewarm about the deceased Observer, but Arlette knew that the first time hit you hard regardless. She had been the same way when it had happened to her, year ago. Now that pain was more muted, pushed deeper inside but still real all the same.

Unlike Sofie, Pari had been surprisingly muted through the entire ordeal. She hadn’t screamed or cried once since Basilli’s death, and in fact spent a lot of time looking at Sofie in a puzzled manner.

“Why is Sofie-sis crying?” Pari asked eventually.

“Basilli- Basilli’s gone. He’s dead. We’re all sad.”

“But why? Basilli was too weak. The bad man was stronger, so Basilli died. Grandfather says that the strong killing the weak is the way of the world.”

Arlette gave the beastgirl a disturbed glance. She'd always believed Pari to be a cute, ignorant little girl. A little feral, a little strange, but that was all. It was at this moment that she realized how off her assessment had been. It was now that Arlette realized just how little she understood of the savage child.

“Pari, we talked about this. Nothing about what happened there was natural. It’s normal to feel sad about it.”

“But Sofie-sis didn’t even like Basilli.”

“Pari! That doesn’t mean I wanted him to die! He had so many years ahead of him! So much that he could have done...”

“Pari sorry.”

“It’s okay, sweetie...”

Arlette rubbed her face with her hands. A bizarre little alchemist with a disturbing attitude towards murder, a girl who claimed to be from a different dimension and was somehow possibly telling the truth, and her, all stuck together in a wagon on a journey together towards their own doom. When was the last time she’d had actual control over the course of her own life? It seemed like ages ago. Maybe she never had control. Maybe it had all just been a delusion. Something she’d constructed so she wouldn’t buckle under the weight of her own life.

The group settled back into silence for a little while before Sofie spoke again.

“So, uh, shouldn’t we have one of those wakes for him? Like what you did for the others back in Poniren.”

Arlette grunted. There was a conspicuous lack of alcohol available, and wakes like that were supposed to be done by the survivors. She doubted that they counted as survivors at this point. But still, he deserved one like all the rest, and there likely wouldn’t be a better time to do it anyway. “Sure. Let’s do it.”

Things went quiet for a moment as Arlette reached back into the past.

“Did he ever tell you how he ended up joining the Ivory Tears?” Sofie shook her head. “It might surprise you, but he never actually wanted to join up with us.”

“What happened?”

“Several years ago, we took a job from the government of Begale. Every society has crime lords and whatnot, but Eterium had a particular problem — a certain crime lord had grown too powerful. They were known as the “Hidden Shadow”. Nobody knows anything about them, not even their gender, but they were swallowing other crime lords left and right. Begale was where they’d made the most headway, basically consuming all the crime in the city until every crime boss in town answered to them.

“Begale’s head officials decided to knock them down a peg or two. Wipe some of their people out, take their stuff, create an environment where others would be able to challenge the Hidden Shadow. Show them who’s still in charge. Now normally if you have a problem as the ruler of a city, you send some of the city watch out and they take care of the problem. But when you’re dealing with organized crime, chances are half the guards are on the take, so instead you bring in people from outside. You bring in mercenaries.

“We were one of several bands that took the job. The plan was to strike this one compound at night, but a few hours before, somebody delivered a note to our inn warning us that it was a trap. It was. Without the details about the trap in the note, we probably would have all died that night.

“Two days later, Basilli showed up, bleeding from all over, asking for protection. I was skeptical but he knew everything written in the note, including details we didn’t share with the others. He’d been working as a double-agent for the city watch, playing the role of a mid-level criminal. When he learned about the trap he wanted to report it but he believed that people inside the government were compromised, so instead he reached out to us.

“He was right. The Hidden Shadow used their contacts inside the watch and figured out it was him. They tried to kill him four times while we were still in the city. Eventually we left Begale, and he had to come along or die. He had to leave his entire life behind. That’s how he ended up stuck as a member of our band. And then...” Arlette let out a sigh. “And then he died anyway.”

“I feel guilty now that I always thought he was a little skeezy,” sniffed Sofie. “He always seemed to keep people at arm’s length. Never wanted to open up, like he was hiding something.”

“Everybody thought that about him. Personally, I think somebody who’s been in that kind of work is always going to be that way. He lived a life where he had to be somebody else on the outside every day, and I think he started seeing everybody else as being just like him, people hiding behind masks. I imagine that it’s really difficult to let go of that suspicion once you’ve latched on to it.”

Sofie began to weep again. “And here I was, going to tattle on him because I overheard somebody called him ‘Jakob Barabe’ once. I’m the worst.”

Arlette sighed. Now she knew why they always drank when they did this. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Now they were both feeling even worse.

“To Basilli Inciar,” Arlette intoned mournfully, raising an empty hand as if it held a stein.

“To Basilli Inciar,” Sofie sobbed in reply, raising her hand to match, “or Jakob Barabe, or whatever his real name was. May he rest in peace.”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Sofie said, wiping the tears and mucus from her face. “So... you’re a princess?”

Arlette felt her soul go cold. She leveled a glare that could freeze the ocean at the young woman.

“I guess that explains why you know so much stuff about the world, huh?”

“I’m not talking about it.”

“I just thought that maybe it would take our minds off of-”

“I said no! Don’t ask again!”

“...Okay. I’m sorry.”

The conversation lapsed once more, and silence reigned. Arlette sat there, rocking back and forth with the wagon, a soup of forlorn regret simmering inside her.

“I apologize,” she said an hour later. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“It’s alright. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.”

“I have a request.”

“Yeah?”

“Tell me about your world. What was it called again?”

“Earth.”

“Like... dirt?”

“Yeah. Not very creative, I know.”

“I just... I want to hear about it. Please.”

“Pari wants to hear too!”

Sofie chuckled. "Okay, okay..." And so she began to talk. She talked about "supermarkets" and "microwaves" and hot fresh water that came out of tubes and other strange and wondrous things. She talked about government, and music, and everything and anything else that came to her mind. She talked for hours, her voice halting only rarely as she paused to think about what to talk of next.

Arlette had never been able to accept Sofie’s fantasy world. Even as the evidence had mounted that there was something more to this than the insane ramblings of a girl detached from reality, the skeptic in her had always fought back and prevented her from really, truly believing in this place called “Earth”. But at the moment that voice had gone silent. For just a little while, Arlette closed her eyes and listened to Sofie’s words, trying to imagine the place the young woman described. For just a little while, Arlette wanted to believe. A world where people didn’t live in fear of each other and the world around them. A world where people weren’t subject to the whims of a powerful few. A world where people harnessed lightning every day, flew through the air, and lived long, fulfilling lives. For just a little while, Arlette wanted to believe that somewhere out there a world existed where she could have been truly happy.

As their unwilling journey back to Kutrad continued, the days fell into a routine. Every morning, a small loaf of bread was thrown at each of them, and they’d get a drink from a mostly-clean bucket of water. That was to be their breakfast and their only meal until nightfall, when some more loaves would be tossed in their general direction. Arlette couldn’t get a good glimpse of what they did with Jaquet. They were probably feeding him by hand, judging by the mocking laughter she’d hear during mealtime coming from the wagon where he was being kept. There was no way they would let him move even a single arm to feed himself. That would be disastrous for them all.

They traveled throughout the day, rarely stopping for anything. They definitely didn’t stop so that any of the prisoners could urinate or defecate, much to Sofie’s horror. No, they let their prisoners do their business where they sat. At the end of the day, or when the smell became too much, a water Observer would spray down the wagon and the prisoners with blasts of water, removing the waste. Arlette found the entire experience profoundly humiliating. She was certain that this treatment was something Sebastian had directly ordered.

Speaking of Sebastian, the man seemed to lead a mercenary band these days, judging by the thirty men and women who protected the wagon from anybody who might get a dumb idea. She couldn’t tell what band, though. None of the mercenaries wore anything with their band’s emblem on it, and they never talked about it where Arlette could hear. This was undoubtedly another one of Sebastian’s instructions. The man was meticulous in his planning. He wouldn’t tip his hand any more than necessary, even to those about to die.

“Sofie-sis, I’m bored,” Pari whined one afternoon as they approached the Kutrad border.

“Alright, let me think,” Sofie replied. “Oh I know, remember how you were going to teach me to be strong like you? Let’s do that!”

“Okay! Just watch Pari!”

“Pari, don’t-” Arlette started to say, but it was too late.

Pari snapped her fingers, her face showing her concentration. Instead of a small flame appearing where her fingers had pressed together, nothing happened. Then the girl began to scream and writhe.

“Pari, what’s wrong?” cried an alarmed Sofie. She reached her hands out towards the girl but the chains prevented her from getting close enough to touch.

“Hurt!” the beastgirl whimpered and tears of pain streamed down her face. “Pari hurt!”

“Arlette, what’s happening?”

Arlette sighed. “These chains are made of tucrenyx. Did you ever wonder why Basilli didn’t just melt away the chains when we were captured? Or why not a single Observer in the Second Army tried to do anything after being captured? It’s because tucrenyx is an evil metal. It prevents anybody from Observing, instead bringing tremendous pain when anybody tries. I’m sorry, I forgot you didn’t know that. The pain goes away after a bit.”

“Did you hear that? It’s going to be okay, Pari. Just breathe.”

“P-pari heard...” the girl gasped. Her breathing had already calmed down a little. The pain would be fully gone soon.

“So, what about Feelers like Jaquet?” Sofie asked. “Does it not affect them?”

“Well it saps your soulforce little by little over time. Eventually anybody, be it Feeler or Observer, wouldn’t be able to do anything until they’d been freed. But other than that, no. Did you ever wonder why Jaquet is practically encased in metal right now? Anything less and he’d be tearing himself free.”

“Nothing I do makes it hurt,” mumbled Sofie glumly. “I guess I really don’t have magic after all.”

None of it mattered anymore. The fights in the forests of Kutrad. The hushed, tense journey through the Deadlands. The calmer but anxious days at Lucas and Liela’s home in Begale. The frenzied flight through the Eterian southwest. All of that might as well have never happened, Arlette mused as she stared at yet another dungeon ceiling, this one of the Kutrad variety.

In the end, she’d ended up in a cell in Xoginia, the nation’s capital, with the same fate she’d been running from the whole time. The only difference now was that two innocent others had been roped in with them. Soon they would be paraded before hundreds of thousands of people, all braying for their execution for a crime they’d never committed. Arlette had never believed that life was fair, but this took things to an absurd degree.

Everything had been one giant exercise in futility. She’d been nothing more than a rat running inside a wheel — all that work for nothing more than the illusion of progress. Now for her efforts she was a rat in a cage, waiting to be exterminated. What a fool. She’d not only let herself down, but everybody else as well. Her soul weighed heavy with the burden of her failures.

“Hey, is Jaquet okay?” Sofie asked from her spot to Arlette’s left, bringing her back to the moment. The two of them sat along one wall while Pari and Jaquet sat along the other. To her left stood the cell’s only entrance, a door made of metal bars that let somebody outside see everything in the cell without having to open the door.

Arlette grunted in response, a proper answer not something she had in her at the moment. Something was wrong with Jaquet. He didn’t move, he didn’t speak. He just laid there encased in his restraints. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing under all that metal. Maybe he was already dead. Maybe he’d escaped in the only way that remained.

A series of footfalls broke her from her thoughts. They were coming to take her away, to throw her up in front of everybody, to end her life in humiliation and defeat. She had accepted that fact now. There was no struggle left.

The footsteps slowed, and a man came into view. He looked surprisingly average, really, with a moderately handsome face, slightly droopy eyes, short silver hair, and a thin, well-trimmed silver beard. A little taller than most, his body seemed fairly fit, with a slight chubbiness creeping in. In a crowd he would have blended right in. That is, once he discarded the crown, cape, and scepter. Iorweth Morgan. The man who’d set everything in motion.

The man stared at them all for a moment before opening his mouth to speak. “I wanted to come down here to apologize to you all,” he said. “Your futures are not just, and that is my doing. But know that through this farce you have saved this country from ruin, and for that I shall always remember you. If you have any requests, you may speak them to me now.”

“Let these two go,” Arlette pleaded immediately, motioning to Sofie and Pari. “They were never involved in this.”

“Arlette, what are you doing?” Sofie asked, alarmed.

“Getting you two out of this while I still can. You don’t deserve to die here.”

“Neither do you!”

“I’m sorry, but they must join you in your fate,” the king said.

“What! But why? They’re nobodies! Just people we ran across along the way!”

“They have use. With the death of third member of your group, others must take his place. This one will serve as proof that your conspiracy extends beyond what we knew, raising fears of a larger conspiracy lurking in the shadows,” he said, pointing at Sofie. “Also, judging by the brand on her neck, the beastgirl must be a freed slave, which will be used to demonstrate your goals and motivations. As you Gustilians are well known for your desire to emancipate the slaves in this country, the people will believe the claim. They need an enemy to rally against, to triumph over. While I take no pleasure in this, such measures are necessary in these troubled times. Your sacrifice will allow Kutrad to unite for-”

“Fuck off, shitbag.”

Shocked at the sudden outburst, Morgan stumbled mid-sentence and stared at the young woman who had the audacity to interrupt a king.

“Unity?” Sofie fumed, incredulous. “That’s what all this was about? All that blood and pain and terror and anger was just so you could pull some false flag bullshit? Fuck you, you entitled little shit.”

“I understand your anger-”

“Shut your fucking trap!” Sofie spat. Arlette had never seen her like this before. “You know full well that this whole thing is bullshit. You’re not here for us, you’re here for yourself. You’re here to feel better about what you’re doing. You’re here so that when you lie down to sleep tonight you can tell yourself that you did what you could for us, you coward. You think that after you made our lives into a living hell for months you can just waltz in here and say you’re sorry and everything is okay? Fuck. That.

“You’re nothing but a fucking failure. You know what kind of countries have to try this kind of desperate crap? Failed states. Sad little dictatorships led by blustering strongmen clinging to power through fear and anger. The kind of people who go down in history as fucking jokes. That’s who. That’s all you are. A real leader would never pull this shit. A real leader wouldn’t have to lie to his own people. But you’re nothing like a real leader. So go soothe your feelings someplace else, you pathetic little man. Because if I hear another word out of you, I don’t care how many chains are holding me down; I’ll kick you in the balls so hard you’ll fucking choke on them.”

For what felt like an eternity, the only sound anybody could hear were the huffs of Sofie’s angry breaths. Arlette braced herself for the worst. You couldn’t talk that way to a ruler of a country! But instead of signaling for guards to come punish the young woman, Morgan almost seemed to deflate. Finally he simply sighed.

“The executions will begin tomorrow morning,” he said as he turned away and left.

“What in the world was that?” demanded an incredulous Arlette once the king had retreated.

“I’m not sorry. He deserved everything I said and more.” Sofie stated defiantly.

“But I might have been able to convince him to let you go. There’s no reason why you should have to die with us.”

“He wouldn’t have. People like him think of people like us as pieces in a game, not as human beings. Besides, even if you did, we’d just end up as slaves again anyway, and I’d rather die with you than be a slave again.”

“You don’t deserve to die!”

“And you do?”

“I... it doesn’t matter what I deserve anymore.”

The dungeon quieted down as Sofie’s fury began to abate, and they settled into an awkward stillness again. Every so often, Sofie would chat with Pari, making sure the girl wasn’t too frightened or upset, but Pari still seemed mostly oblivious to what was to come.

It was hard to know how many hours had passed since Sofie’s eruption. There was no natural light to be seen, the damp stone lit by the light of a single torch and nothing more. With nothing else to do, Arlette began to spiral from a deep depression into bottomless despair, her mind going over every mistake, every decision, wondering where she had gone wrong in her life. She’d never imagined that there was something even more terrible than death, but the long, silent wait for the inevitable was somehow worse. Nothing but time with which to contemplate your mortality, to stew in every self-recrimination, to reach out into the darkness looking for something, anything to grab on to and find only nothingness.

“I’m scared,” Sofie whispered into the gloom.

“Me too,” Arlette replied.

“We’re really going to die, aren’t we?” the young woman sniffed. “It never felt real to me until just now. This whole world in a lot of ways has never felt real to me. All this time, part of me has just been waiting for me to wake up, for this all to be a dream... but I’m not going to wake up, am I.”

“...yeah...”

“Do you think anybody will mourn our deaths? Do you think they will give us a funeral like you gave your friends?”

Arlette didn’t answer.

A cough pierced the silence. “Arlette.”

Arlette’s head shot up at the sound of Jaquet’s voice. Something was off.

"Arlette... I'm sorry. I didn't want this to happen."

"Jaquet, what's wrong?"

"I didn't want it to come to this. But I don't have a choice anymore."

"What's with your voice? What in the world are you going on-" The words died in her throat as her best friend, the one person who she'd always believed in, who had stood tall with her through thick and thin, began to shrink.

“No...” she begged. “No, Jaquet, you aren’t... you can’t be one of...”

The man she’d known as “Jaquet” did not reply. The smaller, lithe elf working his way out of restraints meant for a Feeler twice his weight was all the answer that was needed. With a supple ease, the elf bent and twisted one last time and the last of his restraints fell to the floor, leaving him naked but free.

The world dropped out from beneath her. Life was empty. Everything was a lie. She’d thought she’d seen the bottom. She’d been wrong.

Avoiding eye contact, the man she’d once trusted more than anybody else walked towards the cell door. Putting his palms up to his mouth, he bit them deep enough to draw blood. Dark crimson liquid rushed from his hands, lashing and writhing about. He put his left hand against the back of the door, the blood flowing around to the other side where the keyhole would be. A soft click echoed off the stone walls, the elf pushed the door aside, and strode out into the hallway.

Several moments later, a hand reached around the doorway and tossed a large keyring onto the ground by her side. “Live well, Arlette,” said a voice she didn’t recognize. Then he was gone.

First it came out as a chuckle. Soon, it grew into a giggle, and then into a full-blown belly laugh. Tears fell from her cheeks like a river as the truth of her reality was uncovered, raw and undeniable. She was alone. She’d always been alone. She’d just never realized it.