Page 133 of A Soul to Touch

“Why do you ask?” He wasn’t sure why she wanted to know this.

“Because you make it really hard to get to know you. You said you’ve wandered all over the world. I wanted to know if you’d seen the sea.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it. I have walked almost all the way around the land.”

“But I’m guessing not the south beaches?”

His head tilted. He was surprised she’d know that.

“No. It is very difficult for a Duskwalker to go there.”

“Demons can’t really go there either,” she said, and he swore he could hear that her lips were quirked in humour. “We, in the north, have the most fortified Demonslayer guild, but thesouth has more humans. They battle the land and the sea from Demons, so I imagine getting there would be difficult for your kind too.”

“There aren’t many trees for Demons to hide from the sun, and it is far from the Veil,” he responded.

“I asked to be stationed there for a while. I think I’m one of the rare humans that has been almost everywhere. Where did you live? Mm... your cave, I mean. Before it was stolen by Demons.”

“West, I think. There was a village that burned down not far from my cave. It was many years ago... but I watched it from the forest as a large number of Demons took advantage of its burning walls.”

Mayumi stiffened and looked over her shoulder. “Are you talking about Leeside Town?”

Faunus shrugged in answer. “How would I know what a human town is called?”

“Did it have a big bell in the middle?”

“Yes. It was annoying to me. I could hear it all the way from the Veil, which is why I went there when it wouldn’t stop ringing.”

She covered her lips with the fore knuckle of her index finger. “Leeside burned down around a hundred years ago.”

“I... obtained much humanity that night.”

Eventually, the smell of blood and burning meat had sent his mind into a thoughtless craze. He’d spent days fighting with Demons while trying to get to any human who had unfortunately found themselves trapped under house rubble.

“Why did you want to go to the sea?” Faunus asked, beginning to become uncomfortable with sharing those memories – especially since they were hazy, as most bloodlust or rages were.

He could only imagine what he would have looked like to another. A mindless, roaring beast in the middle of a destroyed, burning town that was being overrun by Demons, surrounded bythe sounds of screams and that damn bell ringing until a Demon took it down.

Then sudden quietness, which only left the sound of crackling, dying fire and bloodthirsty creatures sniffing and searching.

“I wanted to know more about you, not the other way around.”

Mayumi gave a little moan when he finally started working his thumbs into the tops of her shoulders and the sides of her neck. He used the soap to help make his strokes more slippery, just as much as he used it to wash her.

“I don’t have much to share, Mayumi. I have spent most of my life wandering what I can of this world.”

“What were you searching for?”

“Everything,” he admitted. “And nothing. I just didn’t know what else to do. I felt lost.”

I have always been searching... So why did I stop when I found her?It was when he’d found Mayumi that night that he stopped wandering and began visiting homes in curiosity, learning, and even began trying to befriend the Demons.

The moment that little child had reached for him and asked him not to leave her again... Faunus finally stopped seeking something.

“Fine,”she sighed. “My father’s family has always lived in this house, so I wanted to see where my mother was born.”

“She was not from here?”

He expected her mother to be from one of the closely residing towns.

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