'But how will we eat?' She didn't want him to stop talking.
'We will eat.' Silence. 'I feel more at peace in the Cold World. For there, if a man is strong, he can breathe the free wind unafraid. Only the hardiest predators remain, and among them is respect.'
'What about your people?'
'They will follow the herds, as they always do.'
'Then how do you know what the winter is like? Or will you go with them?'
A hurt, disbelieving look came over him. 'NO.' He felt frustration pushing back at his own will to live. 'These past three Winters I have lived alone.' He looked out, and thought he might know what she was feeling.
'I have known loneliness, too, though perhaps it is another kind. Your sorrow is for friends and ways that have died. Mine is for companionship that I have never known. Because to my people I am what this world is to you: something beyond their experience. And because of that they fear it, and mistrust….. I would be your friend, Sylviana, but I don't always know how.' She turned, and in the shadows his face looked worn and grim: there was no doubting his pain. She lowered her eyes to the ground.
'I just don't understand,' she said, half in a whisper. 'I don't understand it at all. Why was I brought here and left to go on? Sometimes I think it was just to have one illusion and then another stripped away, till there's nothing left but the struggle to survive and not go crazy. And when the last of my illusions are gone….. What then, Kalus? What's left?' He thought for a moment, deeply, then raised his head and answered.
'Life.' He touched his breast. 'What is here inside us. Perhaps that is not so much. Or perhaps it is everything.' He turned to face her. 'I cannot always let myself grieve, Sylviana. Can you see that?' She nodded. 'But if you have to cry, I will try to comfort you. . .as you once did for me.'
She felt a wall give way inside her. She didn't answer, but slowly put her head to his chest, silently begging to be held. And finally the tears came. He held her warmly, feeling so many things. At length she drew back, and held his eyes with hers. There was only one way out of this desert. Here and now.