About this image

Disclaimer: If things look too good to be true, chances are, it is. I used a massive amount of photoshop.

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Note to self: Get a new journal, this one has blood spatters on it.

Today was not a terribly exciting day, but Agaile has certainly shown some definite insight since the contact with the strange woman in the tavern. The mere thought of her still makes my hair stand on end.

Agaile was staring off into the distance as she is wont to do, perched on the end of a cliff that I didn't even want to go near as we sat down in the midst of traveling for a rest. She coaxed me closer to the edge, but I was still several feet away.

"People collect objects. Definitive objects." She said, in way of starting a conversation. I was used to her odd tangents and starts that didn't immediately make sense.

The woman would occasionally carry on multiple conversations at once. My uncle was one of the few others who ever did that. Ah... Sinderion. How I miss you.

"What about them?" I prompted, when that seemed to be the entirety of what she was going to say.

She turned, and blinked at me, the pale light in her white eyes winking out as the lids shut over them for a moment, and she regarded me curiously. "People collect items throughout their life. They cannot survive without objects. When one does not have them, they immediately go about acquiring them."

"You mean like food and water?"

"No. Objects. Things that necessarily are not required. Inanimate objects to bring one pleasure. Things that sparkle, or shine, or contain words." She gestured to my notebook as I doodled a small butterfly in the corner of one of the pages. My pen went still for a moment, "You have many books you have read and you know the knowledge contained with your memory. You do not need to keep them. You do anyway."

"I might share them someday. With you, perhaps, once we are finished with teaching you words." Teaching Agaile to read had been an ongoing pet project for some time now.

"Yes. Yet, you keep them." She was right. They were stowed away neatly in my pack. I hadn't the heart to leave them somewhere, though I should have found somewhere safe to protect them already. Her head tilted quizzically, "If you are to share, why are they with you? Sometimes, you reread them, though you do not need to. Your memory is not that bad. You read them because it gives you pleasure only. You waste time with old instead of new, solely to enjoy."

"We waste a lot of time for enjoyment."

"Yes. However, I can see wasting time with another. They are dynamic. Changing. Alive. A book or object is not. It remains the same. It will not change from one time you look at it to another. It is static. How many times can one derive enjoyment from a dead object?"

My mouth pulled down in a frown. Agaile's questions were getting harder as she gained clarity and knowledge over time.

Agaile quirked her lips, "You only relinquish your books when the enjoyment from them is outweighed by the joy of giving them to another to enjoy. It is curious..."

I shook my head and finally understood. She would always continue to surprise me with the depth in which she saw things.