Malaya never knew of peace her whole life. Constantly, she fled and hid, ate either cold stolen bread or awful sea stew, and slept on the worn fleece bedroll that had accompanied her in her journeys since she was dropped off by her parents at the Kingfisher.
She became used to it, you see, that she didn’t even complain much. Not that she could, after all. She was a void person.
This time, the peace that she didn’t—and could never—have came in the form of boredom. For almost a year now, her uncle took the risk of sailing the Kingfisher through the known world’s roughest seas without a crew (not that they would have agreed).
The war in Osreon was reaching its peak, and it became more and more dangerous for Malaya to be staying there. Everyone was subconsciously hunting for her and her kind, and the chances of survival if they did find her was near zero.
Mister Stein, her uncle, believed that Malaya would be safer beyond the map.
At the border of every standard Osreon map was what was dubbed the Whittling Sea, and it was at the border for a reason. It encompassed most of the eastern border that no one had ever seen what lay beyond it. This is because even the great Captain Linus, most probably just a fictional character (but an impossibly overpowered one, at that), could not traverse through the giant waves that constantly pursued.
Mister Stein, however, proved himself greater than Captain Linus. With no one but him and his seventeen-year-old niece on the Kingfisher, it took him a full week and a half to escape the rapid waves.
They found a lonely mountainous island that existed beyond the reaches of any expert seafarer.
The rest was a mere fuzzy memory to Malaya now. Months alone in the unnamed island drove her to forget little by little, even the crisis that she was supposed to be in at in her country. However, there was not much she could do except to stay put and probably talk to passerby ghosts.
She discovered of her ability to talk to ghosts at a very young age, something that drove Mister Stein to the end of wits when he found out. It was the sole reason he took her into hiding in the first place, and look where it got her.
Malaya never liked calling them ghosts. They were anything but that, but she just grew tired trying to explain to her uncle. The things she saw were too vague to describe to someone, as they had no clear sense of… anything, really. “Ghost” was too shallow a word to grasp the complexity of what she saw and felt.
Sometimes they were invisible, sometimes a whole barrage of colors. Sometimes they were just a mere scent or a condensed emotion, sometimes they had a physical form. She never liked the ghosts that were too abstract since they usually exuded hostility.
Malaya called them essences.
And they gave her humanity’s greed.
*
“You aren’t fully human,” said Mister Stein to her once before. Malaya initially understood it as her being a half breed or being the child of rat, but when she grew older, she realized that it meant something even more terrifying.
She did not feel what humans felt. She lacked aspects that made life truly meaningful, truly human. She felt no pain and was empty of wounds.
She could prick herself on her finger, but then the essences around her would start to move in their own obscure ways. Their energy would heal the wound right away in front of her eyes. The only trace of stress is a drop of blood on the surface of the skin.
She could be punched in the stomach, and the essences would once again start to move. Whether they form a barrier for her or something else, she didn’t know, but the punch would feel numb. Yes, the force and impact she could very well feel, but the pain that should have come along with it was not there.
Malaya wouldn’t have realized that she should be feeling pain if not for her uncle’s crew. Once, one of them accidentally cut her with his knife while play-sparring. Malaya knew to hide the cut immediately, not to let them know what exactly she was.
Her big mistake: she was unbothered.
The crew wondered for a long time why a young girl showed no hint of pain at a wound that would make any adult cry. Rumors started to spread—that she was insane, that there was something wrong with her mind.
That itself let her be isolated for years.
Isolation was not new, though. She knew it would characterize the rest of her life.
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