[Two years later]
For two years, Hmu Hmo remained in the settlement. The settlers, once wary, had come to accept him, their cautious nods turning into greetings, their guarded stares softening into familiarity. Yet it was not their welcome that kept him here. It was Dobby—her relentless stubbornness—that anchored him to this rugged crater as if it were the only home worth having.
Through the bitter winters and sweltering summers, through nights of silence and days of shared labor, Dobby tethered Hmu Hmo to this rugged life. Her laughter forced him to learn the land, pushing him to call it his own. And slowly, despite himself, Hmu Hmo did.
Not because the settlement had embraced him. But because Dobby had never let him go like a leash that chained him to the settlement.
His knowledge of herbs made him indispensable to the doctor, his steady hands and quiet wisdom easing fevered bodies and healing wounds that once plagued the unchecked. And when his quiet expertise in agriculture coaxed life from the stubborn soil, even the most skeptical elders—those who had once scoffed at his methods—fell silent, their mutterings of "baseless tricks" swallowed by the sight of thriving crops.
The winter hunts remained an unspoken ritual. He returned with the gatherers, ice clinging to his skin, yet they always hauled back spoils none dared question. No one asked what blade had struck or what snare had secured the bounty. They simply set to work—rendering fat into lamps that pushed back the darkness, boiling stringy meat into stews that filled the hollows of starving bellies.
Sending elders into the woods was never spoken of or practiced again.
"Must be Hmu Hmo's trick!" they murmured through chapped lips, though none could name his methods, only marvel at the miracle he performed with those mana-starved hands.
Dobby clung to him like a shadow to stone, her relentless curiosity carving through his convictions like ice breaking under a thawing glacier. Where others demanded answers, she coaxed them free, unraveling his stargazer's voice—a voice that spun moonlight into spiderwebs and lent thunder the weight of mountain gods clearing their throats.
His fingers traced constellations across the crater's sky as he spoke of celestial dances—moons courting beneath nebulous veils, rains birthing rivers that carved the world with time's patient hand. Through these midnight tales, the girl who had never seen a map conjured cities in her mind, each story raising towers where jagged rock had once stood.
They huddled beneath the garden's lonely oak. Dobby's knee bumped his, a grounding presence, as he asked, "Do you know what makes stars shine?
Her eyes widened, round as full moons. "Tell me, Mu Mu!"
"Hope," he murmured, his fingers sketching constellations only they could see. "Each spark is a wish someone refuses to let die."
She poked his ribs. "Do you have one?"
Her voice stirred something deep, something fragile—the echo of tender hands once clutching his, the same question whispered through a gap-toothed smile. He blinked against the memory.
"Pork knuckle as big as that trunk."
Dobby giggled, bright and unfiltered. "Then I want an egg as big as my belly!"
Her laughter—sweet as wind chimes—always drowned the nightmares crawling from the buried village. Not healing, not forgiveness. But this: her grubby palm in his, spinning foolish wishes until dawn stole the stars.
This was the light in his sky.
—
The settlement thrived in comfortable chaos—shouting matches over patchwork fences dissolved by evening fiddle songs, harvest squabbles soothed under mead's golden tongue. True peace lived in their unbarred doors, in granaries fat as summer bears.
Then came the cough, rattling from the smokehouse. They blamed damp kindling until the black rashes bloomed.
Hmu Hmo's drying racks sagged under the weight of bitter roots and twisted herbs, and his fingers stained a permanent purple from the nightshade's treacherous juice. While the doctor trembled with fever, the former outsider moved cot to cot—applying plaster that smelled of burnt garlic, measuring root doses that balanced on the razor's edge between a cure and poison.
Dobby's fever burned around the bed. Hmu Hmo watched her eyelids flicker, past memories unspooling like withered bandages—sister's hair brushing her toes on the altar, mother's breast shredded into rot. His tears fell.
"Hold on tight, Dobby," he choked, his throat raw, lined with the ash of unspoken grief. Her pulse fluttered beneath his thumb—weak and fragile like a sparrow trapped under his touch. "You're my last wish."
This settlement, with its grudges and gossip, its patched roofs braced for the first frost and off-key harvest hymns sung with more heart than harmony—this tangled, imperfect knot of lives had become his home. Not because they had welcomed him, not because they had needed him, but because somehow, in the weaving of seasons and survival, he had let them into the quiet spaces he thought unreachable
But his strength did not lie in their acceptance. It did not lie in prayers whispered to gods who had long turned their backs. It lay here, in Dobby's cracked lips shaping delirious stories of egg-shaped clouds, in the stubborn breath that refused to leave her chest, in the trembling weight of her tiny hand still anchored to his.
And as the fever raged and the night thickened, he held on—not to hope but to her.
When the fever waned, and his hope remained, Hmu Hmo could have cried out—to the god that watched, to the god that read, to the god who wrote his fate—to the unseen hand that, for reasons beyond understanding, had chosen to grant him a season of peace.
He hungered for this fleeting season—where ghosts wove daisy chains instead of grief, where the buried remained at rest, undisturbed beneath forgiving earth.
Kneeling in soil rich with decay and renewal, Dobby grinned, her mud-smeared cheeks glowing brighter than any starlight. She laughed—wild, unburdened, the sound ringing through the dusk like a promise he could almost grasp.
For the first time in a long time, he wished for stillness, for time to hold its breath and keep them here, for things to remain unchanged. As her laughter wove through the night, he dared to believe—believed that perhaps, if he held this wish tightly enough, it would come true.