Facing the building before her, Noel took a long, slow breath. She felt uncharacteristically nervous, but recognizing it didn’t do anything to stop it. She took a few more deep breaths and then gave up. It seemed this nervousness wasn’t going to go away so easily, so there was only one thing to do. Face it head-on.
“This really isn’t like me,” she muttered with a touch of self-derision and let out a sigh.
The one saving grace was that she was alone here. Leaving Mylène behind—despite her offer to come along—had turned out to be the right call. Not that she’d foreseen this happening, but since it had worked out, she couldn’t complain.
With those thoughts, Noel turned her gaze once more toward the building in front of her. At first glance, it didn’t look particularly unusual. Not completely ordinary, perhaps, but in this town, where so many houses had quirks and oddities, this one fell well within the bounds of “normal.”
That said, “at first glance” was the key phrase. No ordinary house would have swords strewn haphazardly across the porch.
Or at least, that’s how it should be...
And yet, the feeling Noel got from this house wasn’t one of strangeness, it was one of nostalgia. Rather than finding it odd, she felt a faint, almost melancholic familiarity stir within her. Of course, she had no memories of the past. She couldn’t say for certain whether this was nostalgia, but it probably wasn’t far off.
At the very least, back then, she had thought of this house—or rather, a place with a similar atmosphere—as her home.
Well, then.
Either way, she couldn’t stand around in front of it forever. It was time to make her move. With a firm breath to gather her courage, she started walking.
Noel reached the front door and placed her hand on it. She hesitated for a moment, just a moment, before she pushed it open. What met her eyes on the other side made them narrow slightly. This should’ve been a completely unfamiliar place to her. It was her first time visiting, her first time ever setting foot in this town. And yet, strangely, she felt like she knew it.
Because of that, she kept walking. Drawn by a sound she had heard even before entering, she walked straight toward its source. Then she saw the back of a figure she remembered.
“You haven’t changed a bit.” The words slipped out before she realized it.
The sound of hammer striking steel. The sight of someone working metal. It was a sound she used to hear constantly, a figure she used to watch every day. Back then, that was all her world had been. It was everything. She had never imagined there could be anything more beyond it, until...
Noel shook her head.
She wasn’t that same girl anymore. And she hadn’t come here today just to reminisce about the past. With that thought, she took a few calming breaths and then called out to the figure’s back.
“It’s been a while, Vanessa.”
The woman who had taken her in and saved her life. Her savior. The reason she had come to this town—to see the dwarf blacksmith she’d managed to find far more easily than expected. A woman she had once, in a way, thought of as a mother.
But she’d never quite been able to bring herself to say it. And the more she came to know who Vanessa really was, the less she could imagine saying it at all. That stubborn, hardheaded woman would never accept being called such a thing. It was obvious. So she had never actually said it out loud. But neither had she ever found the time to settle on another way to refer to her.
Before their relationship could solidify into something more defined, the elf emissaries had come for her. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, she would have ended up calling the dwarf “master.”
But that was a past that could never be, which was why she simply called her by name, and only after saying it did Noel realize it might have been the first time she had ever done so. Not that it meant anything in particular, but still...
“Oh, it’s you. Took me a second.”
Noel had braced herself, wondering what kind of reaction she would get. And those were the words that floated back to her, far more detached than she had expected.