“…Mintas all of your life?”
He slowly opened his heavy eyelids and tried to focus in on the sound. Coming out of his near-sleep state, it had been muffled by a sound very much like the buzzing of a fly near one’s ear.
“Pardon?” he asked, groggily.
“Have you lived in the town of Mintas all of your life?” Kitalia asked again, seemingly a little irritated that she had to repeat herself.
“Yes… well, no.”
“Try not to mumble,” she chastised. “So, which is it?”
“I mean… well, we moved there shortly after I was born, so I don’t recall living any other place. So Mintas is the only home I’ve ever known.”
“Did you ever have dreams of living anywhere but that small village?”
In the small pause between his last response and her follow-up question Kre nearly fell asleep again, but he jolted awake when she spoke, afraid to let her know that he had nearly passed out. “Once, I suppose, “ he said with a yawn, hoping she would get the hint. “A couple of us always talked about moving to the city, getting a small place for all of us and just working any job we could to make some quick cash. Then using that money, we could go after our real dreams.”
“Real dreams?”
Kre nodded and then immediately felt foolish since she wasn’t actually looking at him. “Yes. Each of us had our own dreams.”
“What is yours?”
He silently appreciated the fact that she used the word ‘is’ as opposed to ‘was’, even though he himself used the past tense and knew that his dream was no longer a possibility. “Honestly? I never really settled on any one dream for my life. Everyone else always seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do or what their gifts were. I never had that… pivotal moment in my life, I suppose you could call it… where you see your future clearly and your path to it.”
There as a long pause during which Kre began to drift back to sleep. As his eyelids fluttered shut and his breathing slowed, Kitalia spoke again.
“Aoi,” she said softly. “I know that moment.”
His interest and his wakefulness both piqued at her innocent sounding words. He knew better than to directly ask about her own moment though, her own dream. Instead, he tried a different approach.
“Is that… the word you used… is that an Ylveryan word?”
She turned to him and even in the darkness he could see her smile, or perhaps it was better to say that he could feel her smile. “Aoi, it is.”
“Sounds similar to our word, ‘aye’.” He tried testing the word out, “Oye… oh-ee…”
Kitalia grimaced, “Only with your unsophisticated tongue. Try saying the word ‘oat’, except instead of pronouncing the ‘t’, replace it with a soft exhale.”
“A-oh-eh,” Kre felt his tongue twist with the unfamiliar manner of making the odd sound.
“Better, but still wrong. Perhaps we can just stay with your language from now on. It will make my heart hurt less and keep my ears from bleeding.”