A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1692 - 1692: Like a Bird - Part 9

"Is that not just because you're sympathetic towards me? Because you're kind enough to see goodness in someone as flawed as me?" Oliver said.

"I do not think so," Nila said, shaking her head. "Yorick. When he gave his life for you, in that charge against the Emersons, did he seem a man going to his grave lamenting all that he had left behind? And the peasants too. Men that would never really have had to give themselves for this fight, and yet they did anyway. All around me, Oliver, men were dying. I could hear their screams, and their terrified faces, but not one of them was regretful. They were grateful."

"Grateful?" Oliver said.

"I don't know what it means either," Nila said. "It shouldn't be the case. We all fear death. The animals that I hunt, when I take their lives, if I don't do it properly, they die wounded and they die terrified, and it is an immense cruelty. It's no different for us people. Which is why I will never be able to get used to the battlefield yourself. I don't know, Oliver… I can't give you the answers that you deserve. I'm not clever enough to see it all. Maybe Verdant could understand…"

"I fear what Verdant would say," Oliver said honestly. "That man sees more good in me than I could see in myself. I wonder at times if he is not blind."

"He isn't blind," Nila said with certainty. "But I suppose he can be a bit… extreme in what he says… Argh. I'd better be going, they'll wonder where I've gone… But, I should try and describe this feeling in a way that's at least somewhat close to what I mean before I do. I don't know… It's like, it's like, you're a big wind, sweeping through, and all these leaves that would have been condemned to rot on the forest floor get to fly through the air with you."

"A wind…?" Oliver's eyes went wide at Nila's poetics, and the girl herself scratched her cheek in mild embarrassment, not quite realizing how much such a sentence meant to the man that she spoke to.

"Or maybe you're a bird of some sort, I'm not sure," Nila said. "But whatever it is, you lift us up with you. And somehow… Somehow… somewhere in that, there is the fact that you almost like being in storms, don't you? Or maybe it's not that you like it… It's just sort of where you belong."

"I see you suffer, throughout these years," Nila said. "Something finds you, as if there is a magnet on your back, and you are forced into battle after battle, and yet somehow, you do find a way. When the sky is all full of lightning, you find a way. When the winds blow at their worst, it seems to be you, Oliver, who can take fullest advantage of them. If you were a bird, or the wind itself – you seem to like it when the winds blow the grandest. You seem to be good at it. And I think, after all, it makes sense. For that's who you are. It's how you were born. You're Tempest."

Oliver was stunned into a silence crushing enough that it almost folded him. The girl's words stabbed through his heart. She knew it not, but she walked along a line of truth that seemed profound enough to him to be prophecy. It was as if the woman that he loved existed beyond herself, for just the shortest amount of time, and those piercing green eyes of hers, that saw the smallest of little creatures in the longest bits of grass, saw through him too.

But then laughed in embarrassment at herself, and the spell was broken. "Sorry. That was dumb. I'd really better go. Promise not to push yourself too hard while I'm away, okay?"

"…Sure. And you promise to look after yourself too. I'll never forgive you if you let something happen to you," Oliver said.

"Stupid. As if I could control everything that happens in this world," Nila said. "But I'll do the best that I can."

She held her arms out for a hug, and Oliver seized her with an abruptness that surprised both him and her. It took her a moment before she returned the embrace, with equal ferocity, her fingers clawing at his back, as if they were to part for far longer than they had intentions to.

"You are incredibly important to me, Nila. Beyond what you could know," Oliver said. "If it weren't for you, I really would crumble. If I were to fly, as you say, I'd fear that I could never come back down if it weren't for you. So don't disappear. Please."

His voice was childish, and it almost cracked, as he said those last few words. They were the traces of weakness in Oliver Patrick that only Nila Felder was privy to. "I promise," she said, knowing what it meant to him. "Never leave me either. Ever, ever. There will never be anyone like you again."

"Hmph," Oliver snorted his disbelief. "You could find a thousand better men, but I'll dare to believe you. Go, then, and see your party well led. Give my regards to Professor Yoreholder."

"I will," Nila said. "And good luck to you, Oliver, on whatever plan that you decide on."

"Ah, about that – I think I've made my decision," Oliver said, just as she was about to go.

"Will you tell me then, before I leave?" Nila said.

"I'll venture out to those villages in the march of our enemy," Oliver said with a smile. "And I'll see if the peasantry there have as much interest in remaining allied with those nobles that rule over them as we do."

"…I wish I hadn't heard that," Nila sighed. "But I suppose I'm the one that pushed you to do what you thought was best, and I can see now that you've said it, this is one of those ideas you aren't going to let go of... Very well, good luck, Oliver."

"Mhm. Good luck, Nila," Oliver said.