Page 80 of Sun Elves of Ardani

“You were barely out of adolescence. I never thought your army would recruit people so young. I assumed you were older than you really were. Some humans haven’t even finished growing by that age. I felt it would be unfair to you for me to stay.”

Kadaki slumped against the rock. She wanted to be angry, but would she have done any different, had she been in his position? “So you decided to wait for me to get older and then come back?” she said skeptically.

“Of course not. I never planned to come back. I tried to move on.” He shot a sad smile in her direction. “As it turns out, I’m very bad at moving on from you.”

She looked closely at his face—what little of it she could see in the darkness—searching for wrinkles. She couldn’t see any. Elves had a strange way of looking eerily ancient and eternally youthful at the same time. “How old are you, anyway?”

He shrugged. “I forget.”

“How can you forget your age?”

“The years start to run together after a while.”

“What year were you born?”

“It’s gauche to discuss age in mixed-race company, Kadaki.”

“Tell me.”

He sighed, rubbing a hand against his mouth. “…Six…” he muttered.

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “…Sixty…”

She raised her eyebrows.“Sixty?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Sixty-seven?”

He winced slightly, then smiled, realizing an upside to her shock. “You couldn’t tell.”

“Well, no. You didn’t seem that old.”

“I’m not old. I’ve got at least another hundred years left.”

“Why didn’t you want to tell me, then?”

“Because sixty-seven is old to a human. If I were human, I could be your grandparent. Don’t you find that strange?”

She wished there was an easy way for her to contextualize this information. But there was no way to translate an elf’s age to an equivalent human age. All the peoples of Heilune were similar in many ways, but their experience of time, and their emotional and intellectual growth processes, were completely different and not comparable.

He didn’t look her age. But he didn’t look much older than her, either. Elves looked too different from humans to be compared on that level, too.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you find it strange that my life will be so short compared to yours?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly. “Very.”

“Does it bother you?”

He took her hand and lifted it to his lips. “If it bothered me enough that it made me not want to be with you, I wouldn’t be here now.”

She pulled his hand to her chest, placing it above her heart. Something occurred to her. “The next time you feel like using dream, come find me instead,” she said.

Neiryn gave her a mildly impatient look. “What is it about dream that you find so distasteful? It’s no more harmful than wine, which you seem to enjoy by the gallon.”

“You said you use it because you’re unhappy. Don’t be unhappy alone. Take the dream if you want, but come to me anyway. Perhaps you will be less unhappy.”

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