They say the Fool was not always alone.
I know this because, years ago, on nights when the fire burned low and the wind howled against the shutters, he told me his story.
He didnât tell it like a tale meant to entertain.
He told it like a man laying out pieces of himself, as if speaking the memories aloud might keep them from fading, or maybe, as if saying them aloud was the only way to bear their weight.
It always began the same way.
"The first time I saw the Fox," he would say, "it was standing in the light just before dusk, that strange, golden hour where the world looks softer than it really is."
He told me how the Foxâs fur caught that dying sunlight like embers holding their last heat, and how its laugh, gods, the laugh, bent the air around it. Not a common laugh, but one that could slice through the stillness and make even the trees pause, as though they feared missing it.
The Fox did not give that laugh freely.
To strangers, it was quiet, even withdrawn. But to those it trusted⌠it came alive. Wild. Untamed. Pure.
The Fool had been one of the chosen few.
He said they were an unlikely pair, the Fox, with eyes like sharpened amber, and himself, a man weighed down with shadows heâd never shaken. The Fool had lived with silence for so long that heâd begun to believe it was safer that way. Yet the Fox slipped past his guard with the ease of sunlight through cracks in old stone.
"It never tried to fix me," he told me once, voice low. "It just⌠stayed. And that was enough."
The valley became theirs. They walked the narrow paths beside the river, where the Fox would tell stories so absurd that the Fool would laugh until his ribs ached. They would linger beneath the great oak, where the Fox would hum tunelessly, and somehow the Fool would feel lighter just hearing it.
The Fool learned the cadence of the Foxâs steps, the tilt of its head when it was amused, the slight pause in its breathing when it was about to say something it thought might be too much. The Fox, in turn, learned the way the Foolâs shoulders eased when rain was coming, how he would bite the inside of his cheek when swallowing hard truths, and how his eyes softened when looking at things he feared to lose.
They were different in every way, yet they fit.
The Fool told me once, with a distant smile, "It felt like finding a missing part of myself I didnât know Iâd lost."
And yet, even as he spoke of it, there was always something in his voice, a tremor, almost too faint to notice, that told me he had known, even then, that it could not last.
Because every perfect day in the valley carried the whisper of an ending.
The laugh that filled the air could be stolen by silence.
The warmth of a shoulder against his could turn cold in an instant.
The paths they walked together could one day be walked alone.
The Fool said he pushed those thoughts away at the time, telling himself not to ruin what was still his to hold. But memory is cruel, it does not only remember the joy, it remembers the shape of the loss before it comes.
And then, one day, the Fox was simply gone.
No storm. No quarrel. No final words.
Only absence, sharp and sudden, as if the forest itself had reclaimed what it had lent him.
He searched, not wildly, but with the quiet desperation of a man trying to prove the past was real. The valley, once filled with the Foxâs voice, seemed larger now, its silence heavier. Every place they had been together was still there, but smaller, emptier, like an echo stripped of its sound.
He told me that the weeks with the Fox had been the shortest and most important in his life. That for the first time in years, he had believed his heart could open again. That love could live even in a man who had learned to bury it.
And then, as the firelight flickered across his face, he said the words I will never forget:
"This," he murmured, his gaze fixed on nothing, "is the most beautiful thing I have ever ruined."
After that, he didnât speak for a long time. But I understood something then, the story was not for me, not really. It was for the Fox, wherever it had gone.
A story meant to keep it alive, even if only in the telling.
Chapter 2.
