“Share my memory?” Shilo looked at Lytah more than a little confused. “As in, you watching it? How?”

“Just think and remember. With bare skin contact, any mage can speak to another via the mind, but I can telepathically read your thoughts and see your memories as well.” She gave him a shy little smile. “Though it’s easier if you let me in.”

“Um, okay, I guess. But I’m still going to talk. It seems too odd not to.” 

Lytah hesitated for a moment before uttering, “I guess if we’re going to build a bond based on trust, I should be a little more truthful. Like I said, most mages need bare skin-to-skin contact to engage their telepathy unless they have linked spiritually with the other, but I do not. I can hear others’ thoughts if I concentrate, especially if the other has no defenses against it. So to simplify, I don’t need to touch you to project my voice into your head. I just initiate the touch because not doing so is frowned upon by polite society and viewed as an invasive act.”

 She met his eyes and softly uttered, “Are you still okay with this?”

At his nod, she squeezed his hand. Then he felt it, an odd presence in his mind much the same as earlier, only this time he wasn’t alarmed. The presence of her will was warm and reassuring, it embraced the recesses of his mind and covered it in a sort of soothing tranquility.

“Asha’s house was one that under normal circumstances I would never go to. But I was hungry and knew it had only recently been boarded up. The Watch sealed it because it was the scene of a crime. Though, they didn’t do a good job on one of the windows, so I let myself in.”

Apprehensively, a ten-year-old Shilo approached a boarded up residence under the cover of the clouded night sky. The cottage was on the outskirts and closer to the woods than any of the other houses in the small district. There were only two boards across the back window and loose ones at that. He wiggled the boards free, pulled back the shutters, and crawled in. The house was dark and still as death. The young boy reached into his knapsack to pull out a candle and tender box. He lit the candle more to banish the darkness he felt than the darkness he could see.

It didn’t help, not when the light shone on the puddle of congealed blood leading to the door. 

“Earlier I had overheard people around talking about what had happened. The woman had lost her husband in a mason accident not even a month before, and now she was found murdered and her daughter missing. They figured trophy hunters came looking for easy targets to sell as oddities to rich humans. But by the looks of the broken furniture and all the blood, the mother didn’t let them take her child without a fight. 

“I would have left then and there, but I needed food.”

The boy moved towards the pantry, however his eyes kept straying back the goriness on the floor. He swallowed the bile rising in his throat and opened the hutch. He found a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, strings of dried fruit slices, and a pouch of jerky. He shoved as much as he could into his packs before heading to another cupboard. He slid the three candles and a box of matches in his pack along with a small sewing kit. A bar of soap and a few washcloths went in as well. 

Lytah silently watched his memory play out and was impressed by how practical the boy was. Every item touched, he considered its usefulness. And anything he deemed usable, he mouthed a solemn thank you to the spirit of the deceased before stuffing it into one of his two packs.

He stepped on something. A careworn rag doll rolled out from under his foot. He pulled his packs off and gently picked it up. The doll was handmaded to resemble a unicorn girl in a yellow sundress with large purple painted eyes and brushed white yarn for hair. The doll had been loved so much, it was worn and stained in a few places. He held it to his chest for a moment and scanned the room, searching. Very carefully he sat it down on the remains of a broken rocking chair. It seemed like an appropriate memorial, symbolizing both the mother and child and the tragedy that had befallen them. He knelt beside the makeshift shrine for a moment in silence before digging in his oversized coat to remove a couple of leather pouches. 

“I figured I disturbed the dead of the house long enough and should leave. But before I left, I needed to get the crap I use to hide my color. I mix ashes and grease together to smear on my skin to make myself look more… normal. The stove had a tub of cooking lard and the hearth had ashes to fill my other pouch. After I got the ashes, I was too busy trying to tie the pouch that I didn’t watch my feet. I tripped over part of the broken rocking chair and that’s when I heard her.”

He fell flat on the floor. The pouches and candle stick flew from his hands and the rocker support hit the back of the hearth with a thud. From that thud, a small gasping squeal was heard. If the house hadn’t been so quiet, he never would’ve heard the muffled squeak of the little girl. 

His curiosity overran his fear. He relit the candle and inspected the back of the fireplace for the source of the yelp. Nothing. The child he was didn’t fully understand the folly of a crawl space inside a hearth but knew enough to realize that was probably too hot a place to store things. Scratching his head, he glanced around. There was a chair backed against the wall next to the hearth. It seemed out of place to him for some reason and it made the hairs on his neck stand on end. He pushed it away. Holding the candle aloft, he ran his hand along the stone wall. But there wasn’t anything there. He looked down. A blanket lay on the floor as if whoever sat in the chair had thrown it down when they stood up. He moved the blanket and crouched closer to the floor. The light showed a thin crack that formed a rectangular shape on the floor just large enough to make him think. 

The sound of swallow breath being pulled through panic lungs grow more intense as he slipped his fingers through the wider crack near the wall and pulled. The trapdoor lifted, revealing a cubby and a young girl holed up within. The smell of urine and fear assaulted his nose and he tried not to gag. The girl had been too terrified to leave, even when it should have become a necessity. 

The look of fear in the girl’s puffy, tear-reddened eyes told him she had heard it all: her mother’s screams, the hunters’ shouts, the struggle, her mother’s dying breath. Shilo knew that look. He remembered the pain, the utter helplessness, the loss of hope. 

But that was all he’d let himself feel, he refused to trigger the memory to let Lytah see the day he became an orphan. 

His memories focused back on the girl. A frizzy, curly-haired, average grey child a little over half-a-decade old that had already witnessed more than any child should. Horrified by it all, the girl had been in too much shock to cry out until now. 

“I tried to reassure her. I told her I’d help her and that it was alright to come out now. I don’t think she believed me. I know I wouldn’t have. Still, there wasn’t much of a choice.” 

Crying, she took his offered hand. She was stiff from sitting in that cramped cubby and needed his help to crawl out, much less walk. She smelled, and he tried hard not to make a face. He saw a half-full rain tub out back and suggested a bath. He grabbed a blanket and another bar of soap, then carefully helped her out the window, all the while trying not to illuminate the bloody floor. 

The water in the tub was cold and hopefully clean since the girl drank from it before undressing. The cold didn’t seem to bother her as much as it should, she just sat motionless in the water staring down at her hands. He had to help her soap up, afraid if he didn’t, she’d never move.

He wrapped her up in the blanket and led her back inside the house. He told her to dress warm in layers and grab a coat. He carefully dropped his packs outside the window and searched for another sack to add more supplies. They couldn’t stay here, not with her mother’s blood on the floor and the Watch conducting an investigation. He didn’t want this scared little girl to become broken at the hands of the wrong person if the Orphan Wranglers found her. Then there was the thought that the trophy hunters may return.

But when he went back to check on her, the girl hadn’t moved from where he left her in the family’s bedroom. She just stared at the emptiness of the room with haunted eyes. Her lips quivered and she choked back her sobs. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her. In that embrace, he felt the girl’s tears break as he held her through her pain. He felt his own tears hot upon his face as he shed them for not only what she lost but for the family he too had lost not long ago.

“I told her we need to leave and that it’s probably not safe to stay here. I helped her get dressed then led her back to the window. There, I made a mistake. I held the candle up to help her see. I didn’t mean to, I was in too much of a hurry and forgot.”

 He instantly regretted the candle, he had been trying to spare her from the sight. She let out a soft little ‘no’ barely above a whisper as she stared down at the blood and sank to her knees on the floor. It was the first time he heard her speak. It was the shaken up voice of someone who feels completely and utterly alone. A voice he used once, four years before her.

“She told me she had no one now. Both of her parents were gone.” In the memory, the girl's voice was frail and hoarse as she choked out her words, sobbing through the tears running down her chubby cheeks. 

“And I told her I knew how she felt, I was all alone too. I asked her if she wanted to come with me. I said I knew I couldn’t replace what she lost, and that I could never take the place of her parents, but we could be there for each other, like siblings and friends.”

She didn’t say anything, she just went to the broken memorial he created and picked up her doll. Then she turned back to him with tears clouding her eyes and slipped her hand into his. Her hand was small, soft, and trembling. She quietly suggested they go. She already knew about death from when her father died and said she understood that her mommy and daddy weren’t coming home ever again.

He asked her name. 

But she didn’t answer, she just looked at the blood stained floor. Quietly, she uttered, “My family is gone. They can’t say it anymore. My name… it will make me cry. Can you give me a new one?” It was an odd request, especially from someone so young, but at the same time, it felt right. 

He thought about it, figuring her name should be special. He noticed he forgot to pick up the pouches he dropped. Grabbing them, he tossed one up and caught it. 

“I named her Asha.”

Pronounced Ash-ah, naming her after ashes in the fireplace that sent him to her but with a feminine spin. Simple, but at same time perfect.

**I thought,** Lytah’s voice telepathically projected into his thoughts. **The last battle with the humans stopped them from doing that. I guess a few must’ve learned we no longer had our famous demon w— weapon of destruction and decided to break the truce.**

“Demon weapon?”

**A mage. It doesn’t matter anymore, the person was decommissioned after the last battle. What happened to that mage was another example that all people, not just humans, are capable of great cruelty to one another. For some people, their own gain is worth more than another’s sanity or even their life.**

“People like that never go away.” 

He slipped his hand out of hers, breaking their link. “Asha went with me at that time because she had no one else. I wanted her for that same reason. We needed each other to fill the empty space in our hearts. Before I met her, I was alone, lonely, and without hope. When I found her, for the first time and a long time, I had someone. A person to care for, to care about, and to care about me. Someone to… love. You never realize how important that is until it is gone. And believe me, it is important. You need it to feel truly alive.”