“Do you believe in destiny?” He asks.

His head drooping, dark curls falling into his eyes. The room was too dark to see, anyway—dark and damp. It smelled like rot and mildew and somewhere he couldn’t see, there was a steady dripping sound pattering an ominous rhythm against the stone floor.

His question—of course directed at the girl chained up and sitting with her back pressed against his—breaks the palpable silence that had fallen between them.

“My people don’t believe in destiny,” is her answer.

He knows her people have their own religion, that they’re taught something different than the church Riel had grown up learning from. Though the church never specified fate or destiny, everything was the will of God. Somewhere down the line that will became the idea of fate, of kismet, of some inescapable prophecy that shackled and imprisoned him.

Aida’s people had no such superstitions, apparently.

“Our god is a progenitor and a protector. He has no wisdom or divine knowledge to assert upon us.”

He knew very little about her god. He could recall from the stories he was descended from giants maybe or that he only had one eye. Riel couldn’t recall.

“How does he guide his people if he has no divine wisdom?” He finds himself asking as soon as the idea presents itself.

He’s not worried about offending her—she’s too patient with him. He’s sure she must be too exhausted to be frustrated with him.

“He trusts us,” she answers. “Though are blood boils, we are pure at heart.”

He makes no reply, let’s her words rest among the sound of dripping water on damp stone as he tries to consider.

He can feel her shifting, her back pressing up against his more for support. She slumps on him but he doesn’t mind. Her body heat warms him in this cold, dark chamber.

“Do you believe in destiny, Riel?”

He wasn’t prepared for the question though maybe he should have been. Aida is wise—so he’s noticed. It’s really no wonder her god trusts her to make her own decisions.

He makes no immediate answer, considering her question in quiet contemplation. After a moment her head tilts back to rest in his shoulder. He can feel the heat of her cheek against his neck. He doesn’t mind it.

He thinks of himself, how he imagined he’d be when he was younger. He realizes, he never thought he would make it to this age. After he lost his mom, it didn’t matter who he had become. There were too many variables, ifs and maybes—what could have, should have beens.

“I don’t know anymore,” he answers, in a low whisper.

The sound of her steady breathing is so close to his ear. He can feel the rhythm of it as her lungs inflate and expand her diaphragm. He thinks she’s finally fallen asleep.

“Did you ever?” She asks.

He leans his head on her shoulder. He can’t meet her eyes but he can feel her hair, the skin of her ear brush up against his temple.

“Maybe as a way to shift the responsibility of what I’ve become. I’ve been thinking about it—” he pauses.

She doesn’t say anything, just waits for him to continue his thought. She is so patient.

“If my god is real and he intended for me to be this way then—“

He can’t finish the thought, but he knows he doesn’t need to, that she knows what he means.

“Cruel god.”

He sighs, letting her words settle again until the idle sounds—the dripping sounds become too loud again.

“Exactly,” he says softly. “But if my god isn’t real, then destiny is something else.”

They fall silent again. She makes no response and he wonders if she’s considering his word or if she knows what she means.

“That’s a heavy burden, Riel,” is all she says, her words spoken softly and slowly.

He knows. He can feel the heaviness of it sinking, weighing down his heart. Every thing his mother ever said to him, every bully Prem ever fought for him, every person or thing he ever rotted from the inside.

He was his rot—the magic he cast—was him. Maybe he wasn’t always meant to be this person. But he also felt like there was no one else he could have been other than this. If things had been different, would he have been too?

He was being foolish. Things were different. People changed him forever. His mom, Prem, Rose and the other fiends—and Aida. She had made him different. She made him feel like himself again.