Faces, it turned out, were harder than words.
Words he could take from her, secondhand, the way a child takes them from a parent without asking permission. A face was different. A face had to come from inside — from some decision, however unconscious, about what a person standing on the outside was supposed to see — and he had no template for that. No mirror, ever, in his entire existence. No face that had ever looked at him with anything close to love that he could borrow the shape of, the way — though neither of them would ever know this — a different Eremos, in a different unfolding of the same story, had once settled on a warm brown eye and a low, unwavering voice as the whole architecture of his own face, because that was the only face that had ever looked at him and meant it.
This Eremos had nothing to borrow. So the face he built, slowly, clumsily, over what might have been another season of Maren simply showing up and refusing to stop, was approximate. Uncertain. It shifted more than it should have, especially in moments of strain — sometimes both eyes carried a low blue flame where an iris should be, sometimes neither did, sometimes only one, as if even his own body hadn't decided yet what parts of the storm under his skin deserved to show.
Maren never once told him it was wrong.
"You look like you," she said, the first time he asked — haltingly, in the clumsy half-sentences he'd started stringing together, *is this — is this right — is this a face — * — and she said it without a beat of hesitation, because it was true, and because she'd already decided, somewhere in the accumulated weeks, that right wasn't a standard she was interested in holding him to. "Whatever you look like is what you look like. Nobody gets to tell you it's wrong."
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit NovelPhoenix for the authentic version.
He didn't have the framework yet to understand how enormous that sentence was. He would, eventually — would spend a very long time, much later, turning it over and recognizing it for what it had actually been: the first time in his entire existence that anyone had told him he was allowed to simply be, without first proving he'd earned the shape of it.
For now, he just repeated the sentence back to her, quiet, testing it the way he tested every new sound — "Nobody gets to tell you it's wrong" — and Maren laughed, surprised, and said, "Yeah. Exactly. Good. You're already better at this than most people I knew when I was alive."
Green-black hair settled in not long after that, dark enough to read as almost nothing in low light — the one part of him, it seemed, that had never actually been undecided, the one thread of the storm under his skin that had apparently always known its own shape even when nothing else did.
He didn't have a name yet. He had a face, roughly, unevenly, entirely his own. He had one word that meant something — Maren — and a growing handful of others orbiting it.
And on the far edge of the gray, close enough now that if either of them had thought to look up, they might have seen it coming, something else had started, for the first time in an unmeasured eternity, to walk toward the sound of two voices where the Between had, for as long as anyone could remember, only ever offered silence.