Her name was Hirondelle and she travelled between the worlds. Well, to tell you the truth, she wasn’t really travelling, more like falling into them, one after the other, without any logic or pattern. She couldn’t control it, didn’t know when and how it would happen next time. One moment she was in one place, then, without any warning, something pushed her out of it and mercilessly shoved into the next one.

She didn’t know when it had all started. Or rather, didn’t really remember. She felt like she had a life before, but with each new place that feeling was getting further and further away, fleeting like time through her bruised fingers. She heard some good people saying that memories are forever... She was beginning to lose her faith in it.

There was a chance she was travelling through time as well. She wasn’t completely sure about that. It all got mixed up. Different worlds, different times. It often felt like the same thing to her. In a way, if a period of time is too long, it may look like you’ve just come to a new world, having no idea that it’s the same one, just much older or younger. Time changes everything after all.

She often thought about the place and time she could have arrived from but didn’t manage to come up with anything. It was possible she had a father, in that place and time. Well, in theory, she was supposed to have one, unless by some wild whim of fate she simply appeared out of nowhere. It was an unsettling thought, but, despite her will, it came into her mind more and more often. Each time she pushed it away, didn’t let it settle within her.

She thought about that possible father of hers. For some bizarre reason, she had a feeling he wasn’t her real father. But he was the true one. The only one she needed. The one that didn’t compromise, didn’t believe in lesser evil. Evil is always evil, no matter how you turn it.

Maybe she had a mother too? Again, not the real one, but the one who loved her. Secretly, yes, hiding it from herself above all, but still loved her with all her heart. There was a very high chance that, if she’d ever existed, she was a very complicated character, yet still a very dear friend to Hirondelle’s father.

Who were they? And, most importantly, where were they now? If they’d ever existed in her life... Perhaps, they had not been there yet? Too many worlds lay between her and those echoes of some other space and time. With each new world the distance between them only grew, leaving her alone. Again. Was she always supposed to be alone? Perhaps that was her destiny?

She met good people during her travels. Met a whole lot of bad ones too. But that didn’t bother her much. Bad ones didn’t scare her. She got used to them, knew how to deal with them. And they knew it too. There was some mad, yet simple and straight honesty about it. Neither they, nor she needed to pretend, to lie, to hide anything. They just faced each other head on, and then, shortly after, only one of them could walk away. She wished she could say that it was always her, but that would be a lie. She had to flee a lot, almost died many times, been beaten, humiliated and suffered through much worse. Pain would be a mercy during many of those moments. But it wasn’t the pain that truly hurt her, it wasn’t the pain that had left the real scars on her and not the ones that she had all over her body. The latter ones she considered a nuisance, worst you could expect from them is itching and some dull pain on a rainy day. Apart from that, they had become just a reminder of her past mistakes she needed fixing. The best thing about it was that she could actually fix them. Because she was still alive. And, as long as she lived, she could fix these mistakes. They were honest, like the bad people she had to deal with. It was the good ones that began to frighten her.

The good ones... The ones that healed her, helped her, warmed her during countless cold winter nights, offered her food and shelter. They terrified her, for many reasons. Contrary to what many would believe, there are a lot of such people. The good people. But there are different kinds of good. She met those who believed they were good and did awful things to justify it, to prove them right. She couldn’t comprehend, refused to understand why they considered it to be a valid reason for everything they did. And what was even worse, sometimes through all those vile deeds, quite often by a mere chance, they managed to do something good. And that’s what made everything else look even more awful, like a drop of crystal pure water in a bowl full of poison.

There was another kind of good people. The ones that didn’t cover up what they were doing, didn’t lie to themselves and others, pretending to do good. No, they did all kinds of bad instead. But they kept saying that all of it was for the greater good. It never was. She knew it for a fact, had seen it so many times she’d lost all count. That greater good had never happened. Not even once. Some justified that by proclaiming it was meant for the ones to come, for some unreachable point in the future. She hated them with all her heart, was disgusted by them all and had no pity for it. That brighter future could never be born out of such abominable actions. Nobody knows what the future holds, even she didn’t know it, even after all her travels through endless worlds and times. The future will never be here, all you can do is deal with the moment you have. And how you do it is the only thing that matters. You’ll never get another shot at it and nobody else would ever care. That’s what she really thought about that type of good.

And finally, there were the truly good ones. The kind of people that just did good, never looked back, never asked for anything in return, never even thought about their actions being good. They simply couldn’t live differently. There was no good or bad for them. They didn’t really know the difference, because they believed that to do good is the only way there is, as if there was no evil around. It was the strangest and most unsettling thing about them. She couldn’t get used to it, like a dog that grew up among the wolves couldn’t get used to a hand that pats it on the head instead of beating it with a club. That was where all of her fears lay, waking her up at night and making her scream sometimes. The fringe between these people and the rest was too bleak, too feeble. At times she couldn’t even see it, couldn’t truly feel it. And with every moment of her life, with every interaction, every new face, she was getting further and further away from it.

She often had to make a choice, often forced to do it. Maybe in some other life she would prefer to walk away, to close her eyes and not see what was happening around her, but she couldn’t do it. Not in this life. The only life she had. That wasn’t her way. If that father of hers she often thought about was real, chances are he’d taught her that. A bitter irony was that it had become hard to tell whether it was more of a blessing or a curse. Perhaps both, but mostly a curse, she often thought. And when the time to make that choice was coming, the one thing that scared her the most was making the wrong one, taking good people for bad ones and bad ones for good... That judgement was a heavy burden, balancing on the edge of her sword, ending up in a lot of hacking and slashing, leaving behind her a road covered by corpses of regrets and disappointment.

A long time ago someone had wished her luck on that path. What a joke. If that was luck, she was a real winner.

Hirondelle didn’t know if these were her own thoughts, if that was something she could ever think of. It often felt like she was a parchment filled with letters written by somebody else’s hand. Perhaps by many hands, written and rewritten over and over again, each one seeing her through the prism of their own feelings and emotions. She was lost, somewhere among these words, travelling between them, jumping from one paragraph to another, from a pile of parchments to a book and from a book to something else that could store texts and stories... Was that her story?

Hirondelle. Was that her real name even? Someone’d called her that. Or something close to that, at least. She had a different name once. She couldn’t remember it and that angered her. She couldn’t even have her own name, just used the variant some idiot had come up with, probably thinking too much of himself. She’d seen so many of them... Well, not all of them were idiots, upon some thinking, but she’d seen her fair share, nonetheless, become part of their lives, left something on their paths, spent some time with each one, touched the strings of their souls, and then, hearing an echo of these strings’ vibrating in the distance, she left, every time. Sometimes of her own will, sometimes against it. She kept leaving everyone behind, jumping from one world to another, from future to past and present, then back to the future again or something like that, she wasn’t sure anymore, maybe it was all a dream. Maybe soon she’d wake up, seeing someone very dear to her standing at the other end of a dark room, waiting for her after a long and difficult journey.

So many worlds... They were flashing in front of her eyes, sparks of memories, each one being unique, each one leaving a mark, sometimes on her body, sometimes on her soul, most of the time on both.

One moment she is sleeping in a cold forest with two bodies close to her to keep her warm because it is forbidden to make a fire there, then, in a blink of an eye, she’s fighting monsters in a cave, letting one of them escape, shapeshifting to a raven. Another blink and she’s riding a metal mount, helping a man who hides his name behind one letter. Or was it a woman? Perhaps it all depended on a choice again... But whose choice was it? Or has it ever happened at all? She felt like she was not supposed to be there, in that distant world of night and glow. Another dream perhaps? Or one more world for her to visit yet?

She saw a couple of women once, very briefly. She didn’t manage to stay in their world, it happened almost like a passing by, with her glimpsing at the two of them standing on a lake shore. But still it felt like they had been waiting for her, spending a lot of time preparing just for that brief fleeting moment in time and not expecting her to stay. It felt important, but she didn’t remember much else except for them and the lake.

The lake. Another memory. Another surge of pain. She had discovered one of her inner strengths on a lake. She’d rather prefer to never have such strength, such burden of power, but fate had made that choice for her. There was a tower somewhere nearby. Or many of them maybe? They all led somewhere, each one changing her forever.

Everyone and everything on her path wanted to change her, use her for some goal or purpose, bend her to their own will. All had been gone. Or most of them at least. But she was still there. Or maybe not yet there, who knows. She was stuck between worlds, got tangled in the timelines and was simply tired of guessing. There was no end or beginning, no past or future, and even her present moment seemed to be something surreal, ground by the multiple conjunctive spheres she so happened to be placed between.

Everything had already happened, was happening right at that moment and was yet to happen at the same time. If there was such a thing as time. She no longer cared. She came to peace with it, accepted her fate. It was the only way to change it. Right now, at that very moment, standing on the crossroads of all those worlds and times, glimpsing at them through tiny cracks and slits, she could see them all and choose her path, for there were many. A multitude of roads she could follow. She was the lady of space and time, leaving her mark on everyone and everything she met, for better or... not so much.

She’d seen it all or had yet to see it. Perhaps that was a good thing. One tale ends, another one begins.

Was once posted somewhere else. Not anymore. Just want it to be here.