Buried Past III

Kies ran through the graveyard, spewing mud everywhere with his heavy footsteps. He needed to find that girl. Her brother. The person whose grave it belonged to. The person that she had been looking at. It was his. Kies Trevan. That was his full name. That was his identity.

After reaching the spot where he last saw her before the girl disappeared into the rain, he looked around frantically for her, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Kies continued running forward and saw a silhouette of a person in front of him. He felt his heart jump, or maybe it was his core. He ran over to the silhouette as fast as he could and grabbed the person by their shoulder.

"What?"

"I found you!"

"Found me!? Who are you? Do I know you?" The person pushed Kies' hands off them and turned around. It was the wrong person.

"Sorry, I mistook you for someone else," Kies apologized to the man who had his arms up defensively and had a look on his face like he was getting mugged by Kies.

"Oh. Don't go around putting your hands on people's shoulders like that. It scares them you know," he told Kies, obviously not liking what happened Kies did to him.

"Yeah, sorry again." Kies didn't really pay much attention to what the man was saying and was looking around for where the girl might have gone. "By the way, did you happen to see a girl in a raincoat go by?" Kies urgently asked the man, placing his hands on his shoulders again without realizing it.

"W-well, no. But were you listening to me? I just said-"

"Thank you!" Kies didn't let the man finish what he was saying and ran off into the rain, searching for the girl. He could hear the man yelling after him to listen to people when they spoke. "Sorry!" he apologized to the man a third time. Normally, he would listen to people as they spoke and wouldn't interrupt them but he was in a hurry right now. Kies needed to find where that girl went.

***

*Knock Knock Knock* Nina knocked on the door of her home and waited for someone to open it for her. She didn't bring her eyes as there wasn't really a point to bring it when there were so many people at the mansion. A maid opened the door for her and greeted her with a concerned look on her face.

"Do you need a towel?" the maid asked Nina, seeing how she was soaked head to toe.

"No, it's fine," Nina politely declined. Only her raincoat was wet and her clothes underneath were still dry. Luckily, she had seen the rain clouds in her room before she went outside and brought the raincoat just in case it rained while she was out.

She stepped into the mansion and quickly took off her raincoat and shook the rain off it outside the entrance. After getting rid of most of the water on the raincoat, she hung it on a hanger next to the door.

"Ne-na!" A small boy ran down the stairs and up to Nina. He had long ears and scars

Nina smiled and crouched down and said, "I'm home." She gave the boy a hug and took him back up the stairs.

When she brought him back yesterday, all the maids and butlers were shocked to see that he was an elf. She thought that it would be hard to convince her parents to let him stay with them but it was surprisingly easy. It didn't take very long for the elf boy to get used to the place and start treating it like his home.

In fact, it took so little time that anyone who didn't know him could have mistaken him for someone who lived here his entire life with how fast he adapted. However, he was still wary of humans, which was a given considering what he went through. The only human that he trusted was her.

He was still skeptical about the maids and butlers, and even of her parents. But Nina was pretty sure that he didn't hate or distrust them. But it wasn't like he trusted them either. It was somewhere in the middle of those two. He had a somewhat neutral attitude and opinion of the people in the mansion.

As the boy hopped up the stairs gleefully, Nina noticed that one of his bandages had loosened and it was about to fall off. When they made it up the stairs, Nina stopped the boy and retightened the bandage so that it wouldn't fall off.

When he arrived yesterday, he was covered in cuts and bruises all over his body. It took Nina several hours to heal all of the minor injuries and another few hours to treat the ones that she couldn't heal. It was amazing how able to move around with all those injuries. Fortunately, it shouldn't take too long for the rest to heal as well. The only problem was that he might be left with scars but that shouldn't be too much of a concern since most of them could be covered with a shirt with long sleeves.

Nina took the elf back to his room to rest. It was the room right in front of hers so that he would feel comfortable here. She opened the door to his room and almost got hit by a stack of books as they fell over and out the door. While she had been out, he had been reading books the entire time. She never knew that their library had so many books in Elvish until today when she went searching for something for him to read.

Nina carefully stepped over the pile of books and entered the room to find it riddled with books. There were books on the floor, books on the bed, books next to the windowsill. There were books everywhere and they were all written in Elvish. How did they even manage to get this many anyway? She picked up the ones that fell outside the entrance and placed them on a table inside the room.

The elven boy also helped Nina clean up the room a little. It was his mess so the least he could do was help out a little. After putting enough of the books away so that there was enough room to move around, Nina picked up a book that was still open and sat on the bed. The elf ran over and sat down on her lap and she handed him the book and he started to read.

Of course, Nina understood nothing the boy was saying since it was in another language but she tried her best to figure the story out through the few pictures that it contained. That was what she would do normally but she was particularly distracted today. She was still thinking about the encounter early with the hooded person at the graveyard.

She thought that she recognized that voice but it turns out that she was mistaken. When she spoke to him, his voice sounded nothing like Kies. Interestingly, he had the same gray eyes as Kies which really stunned her. It might be that he was a wind mage too just like Kies. But maybe not actually... His sister also had gray eyes so it might just be something that runs through their family.

Either way, it was not something she had been expecting. For there to be someone with gray eyes and sound exactly like Kies. It really shook her. Maybe she was just hallucinating since she was still down about it. But even still, whoever that person was, she couldn't help but feel that he was very similar to Kies somehow.

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