I shook my head and turned my face away from him, pressing it on the saddlebag that rested against the roots of a large, lightning-struck tree. Again, with the knowing. He had the stones to go into this situation and declare that he knew how I would feel, if not now, then in the future. He didn’t know a thing about me or my life or what I wanted. Unwillingly, warm tears slipped from my closed eyelids and down my cheeks, dripping down onto the dead roots.

Roots. There was something about roots. Even with the emotional pain trying to break my chest into two, I still remembered that. Something about roots was important, and I didn’t know why it kept buzzing in my head.

That’s how it stayed as we went farther and farther north. To where the dead skeleton trees were the only foliage to be seen, to where any grass was stained white and gray with death and snow, where the rocks were sharp and covered in ice. It could almost be beautiful, almost, had I been here willingly. But I wasn’t and every single bone in my body ached with that knowledge.

Soren continued to try to engage me, and despite the harshness of the environment, the starkness that made it hard to bear alone, I did my best to ignore him or shut him out. But he managed to whittle out answers from me sometimes when I was doing something rote and mindless like dressing the rare rabbit or squirrel that we came across. Stupid things like my favorite color or if I preferred dawn to dusk. Most of the time, I answered sarcastically which left him confused—I was finding out the whole spiel about goblins not able to understand sarcasm was actually true and very annoying—but sometimes when he caught me off guard, I answered honestly and in return, he gave his own answer. So, I learned that his favorite color was dark green, that he preferred the dawn right as the sky went from gray to pink, and that he abhorred the taste of herring. I learned that he preferred vines to flowers, grass, and even trees, that he let them grow almost wild around his home, that he had no siblings and sometimes he wished for that to change despite knowing it was easier to be an only sibling as a goblin.

I didn’t like how human he was after these sessions and how they slowly got my tense muscles to relax as he talked, almost to himself considering the little I had to say to him, and shared and became a tangible person versus a thing taking me from my home.