Chapter Text
Prologue
It took her a year to learn she was invisible.
Well, perhaps not quite a year, but eleven months and twenty-one days came awfully close.
In hindsight, it probably shouldn't have taken her that long. There had been clues, after all. Every town, village and city she had traveled to she had asked the same questions: "Have you seen a man? He's this tall, but his hair's this tall. His eyes are blue. He has hair the color of lemons, the sun, that sign over there. He doesn't talk much, and he carries a sword nearly as big as himself. Have you seen him?"
And every town, village and city had given her the same answer: indifferent silence looking anywhere but at her.
Finally, a small, brown, chittering animal with a curly tail and a tiny, red, overturned bucket on its head told her A Big Secret. It wasn't her accent, it wasn't the arrangement of her freckles, it wasn't her choice of clothes, her penchant for black or any other avenues of blame. The reason why no one had seen him yet was because no one had seen her.
A blazing sunset was not on hand to illuminate this important revelation. A wandering breeze did not idle by to stir the hair at her temples into a picture-perfect moment. Time did not slow itself to make the act of blinking seem wondrous and ethereal. Sweat ran down her temples, courtesy of a too-bright sun. Her hair stuck to the back of her neck. Her backside was numb from thinking too long on the rooftop of a noisy, bustling, desert-colored city. She was unglorious and unprepared to deal with the sinking reality that she was not who she used to be.
She had been black hair and brown eyes once. She had been two inches shorter than the top of his head, but six inches shorter than the top of his hair. She had been a scar at her hairline. She had been skin that rarely sunburned. She had been a chipped bicuspid. She had been two arms, two legs, and a heart that still dreamed of waking up to a sunrise that didn't hurt.
But that was before, she thought. Now, I am invisible...and something else.