In the middle of the night, Draven found himself rousing from sleep due to the heavy sound of flapping wings. Landing on his window sill was his snowy white owl, Midnight, who let out a hoot upon seeing his master in bed.

Draven turned his red eyes to look at his pet. Realizing his master was awake, it let out another hoot.

The King understood his message.

“Again?” Draven frowned and got out of bed.

He went towards the window and asked, “Where?”

The owl hooted in response, and his master looked out the window, as if able to see something from a distance. Draven was about to disappear from his chamber but he found himself pausing in his tracks. The pitiful face of his servant flashed in his mind.

He was reminded of Erlos’ pitiful expression back when he saw muddy footprints on the floor he had been keeping immaculately clean day in and day out. If Draven were to venture out barefoot again like this…

Draven sighed and the pair of boots kept on one side in his chamber moved on their own towards his feet. Only after putting them on did the man in his long dark robe disappear from his chamber. His pet, Midnight, flew away from the palace to follow in his master’s wake.

He soon reappeared in the middle of the Ronan, where he passed by the human girl’s empty house. He already heard from Midnight that she was not there and didn’t bother to check. Instead, he leaped towards the top of the nearby tree, the highest tree in the city, trying to catch sight of her small figure.

However, it wasn’t easy to locate her in a forest dense with thick trees, unlike back when she tried to escape through the open palace grounds.

‘She cannot go very far with that body.’

Every once in a while, Draven changed trees, flashing from one to another.

Just then, Midnight, who was flying around the city to help let out a calling sound that only Draven understood.

Draven disappeared from the middle of the city, only to reappear at its outskirts. He was on the cliff where the city of the Wood Elves ended. Under the ancient tree with fruits like lanterns, he saw a frail body in a dress too long for her small body sitting at the edge of the cliff.

It was the human girl he named Ember.

She was hugging her knees, her face in a daze. Her emerald eyes seemed to be staring at the bright moon amidst the starry sky.

Draven stayed at a distance and simply observed her, not willing to disturb her. She looked lonely and lost as if she had nothing left in this world. Those thin shoulders and that frail back of hers look somewhat lonely, and though there were no tears streaming down her face, it was as if she was crying inside.

He simply stood at a distance, accompanying her in silence.

After a while, Midnight circled above the cliff and perched on the tree branch that was closest to where Draven was standing.

“Doesn’t seem like she is running away this time,” Draven told the owl. The bird’s fluffy head nodded.

“Not worth disturbing my sleep,” he said and turned to leave. The owl flapped his wings to land in front of his master, leading his way back while jumping from one branch to another.

Draven raised a brow. “You want me to walk tonight?”

The owl kept jumping in an almost rhythmic pattern and Draven spoke, “Seems to me that you’re saying you don’t need your wings and prefer to use your feet.”

The owl stopped playfully jumping here and there, and his fluffy body simply sat on one of the branches. With a deliberately slow hoot, Midnight blinked his large round eyes at his master, as if urging Draven to teleport and leave him alone.

Draven smirked and was about to disappear when his sensitive ears heard an alarming sound.

Crack!

“Ahhhh!”

He immediately turned around, only to see that the frail body sitting by the cliff was no longer there. The sounds of rocks and soil falling apart were telltale sounds of what happened.

Before he could even react, a portal of white energy appeared behind him and sucked him inside it. The next thing he knew, he found himself in the air holding a frail female body in front of him.

—–

Unaware that she had caused a certain someone to lose sleep over her disappearance, Ember felt her mind turn calm by the wonderful sight in front of her.

She heard things from Leeora, and she had accepted that this was now her new life. An uncertain future much more colourful and beautiful than she could ever imagine seemed to be ahead of her, but despite that, she felt a sense of loneliness being in an unfamiliar place without Gaia.

‘It would have been nice if Gaia was able to come along with me… we would have been happier in this place than that cave…’

Ember stood up from where she was sitting and went closer to the edge of the cliff. She looked at those cities below the cliff, though she could only see the bundle of lights she assumed to be lamps lighting up those dense trees. Each of them represented something new and wonderful to someone like her.

‘I wonder if Elder Leeora will also take me to visit those cities,’ she wondered. ‘She says other cities look different from Ronan.’

She took a step further at the edge, but the next moment, the soil under her feet gave way. Out of instinct, she grabbed the nearest thing she could, but the stone slipped under her hand and when she tried to grab again, she only managed to hold loose soil.

“Aaaah!”

Rocks and soil fell down with her, but as someone who was raised in the wild, her survival instincts took over her body. She’s falling but her body was brushing along the dried branches stuck in the walls of the cliff. She desperately tried to gain a foothold, no matter if it was a jutting piece of rock or a wayward root of a tree. Her attempts at survival left her with scratches on her delicate skin and bruised her already hurt body.

‘I cannot die here—’