She had been searching for something for a very long time. A time not measured in months or years, but in lives and eras. She could feel it. This backpack carried a strange weight. It wasn’t exclusively her own, as if she were fighting the battles of other souls she didn’t even know. The thing was, it didn’t matter so much where the backpack came from, because regardless, the one carrying it today was her, and one way or another, it was heavy. So she was the one who had to r

Sometimes you don’t see the ball coming straight at your face until it hits you straight in the face. Correction: not sometimes — almost always. The art of a well-aimed blow. The path dissociates itself from the one walking it. I had had so little time to stop that I hadn’t noticed it, but now the trail I was on was going uphill. I hadn’t realized it, but it had become so steep that it looked like stone cliffs with no visible path at first glance. Correction, it didn’t look