Different Roads

The road split this morning.

One path headed east, toward the sea. The other continued south, winding through the foothills toward Southshore. I stopped at the fork to check my bearings, but Brannock kept walking.

In the wrong direction.

"The road is this way," I called after him.

He stopped and turned. Squinted toward the eastern path. Pointed.

"Pirate ship."

I looked. I couldn't see anything except trees and mist and the grey suggestion of water in the distance.

"I thought you were going to Southshore," I said.

"Eventually."

The word hung in the air between us. Eventually. Not now. Not soon. Eventually. A word that meant nothing and everything at the same time.

"Then why are you leaving the road?"

He scratched his beard thoughtfully. "Heard a pirate ship ran aground. Few miles that way." He gestured vaguely toward the coast.

"Is there someone you're meeting?"

"No."

"Then why?"

He looked at me as if the question itself was strange. As if why was the wrong word entirely.

"Never seen a stranded pirate ship," he said. Then, after a pause: "Could be interesting."

Of course. Of course it could be interesting. What else would it be? This is a man who once spent an hour untangling himself from a fishing net because he'd never mended one before.

I stood at the fork in the road and felt something unexpected. Not anger. Not frustration. Just... a quiet understanding.

Brannock was never going to Southshore. He was never going anywhere in particular. Every step he takes is the destination. Every detour is the point.

Loaf had already started ambling down the eastern path, his massive dark shape fading into the trees. Brannock clapped his hands together and gave me a grin.

"Well then."

He didn't say goodbye. I don't think the word exists in his vocabulary. Goodbye implies an ending, and Brannock doesn't seem to believe in those. Things just... continue. Or they don't. Either way, it's fine.

I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to.

"You're impossible," I called after him.

He turned, walking backward now, and his grin widened.

"That's what everyone keeps tellin' me!"

He waved. A big, cheerful, two-handed wave, like we were old friends who'd known each other for decades instead of strangers who'd shared a week of road.

I waved back.

Then Loaf snorted somewhere in the trees, Brannock turned and disappeared after him, and the road was quiet again.

I continued south alone.

---

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The strangest thing happened an hour later.

I was walking through a meadow — a small, quiet patch of green between two ridges — when I saw it. A flower. Yellow petals, folded into little cups. The same kind Brannock had stopped to study four days ago.

I stopped walking.

I looked at it for a long moment. The way the light caught the edges of the petals. The tiny drops of morning dew collected in each cup. The way it grew crooked, reaching toward a gap in the trees where the sun broke through.

It was beautiful.

Not useful. Not medicinal. Not a clue or a sign or a piece of the puzzle I've been trying to solve since I left Goldshire.

Just beautiful.

I knelt down and picked it carefully, holding the stem the way my father taught me when I was small. Then I opened my bag and tucked it inside, between the pages of the small journal I've been carrying.

I didn't need it. It served no purpose. It won't help me find answers in Southshore.

But Brannock would have stopped for it.

And I realized, standing in that meadow with the morning sun on my face, that I was glad I did too.

---

Southshore is still ahead of me. I still have no answers. I still don't know what my father was hiding, or who opened that chest, or what any of it means.

But my head is up now. I'm watching the road, but I'm also watching the edges of it. The flowers. The beavers. The fishermen.

There's a whole world between here and the answers I'm looking for.

I think I'm finally ready to see it.