Years have passed since I last heard the Fool speak of the Fox.
Time, as it does, has softened the lines of his face and bent his shoulders forward, but it has not dulled the weight in his voice when her name, though he never spoke it, lingers in the air between sentences. Even silence has a way of carrying her.
I have walked the valley as he once did, retracing the paths he described. I have stood beneath the great oak where the Fox would hum, leaned over the river’s edge where laughter once spilled like water, and felt the stillness that remains. It is not an empty stillness, no, it is a stillness that remembers.
People here speak of the Fox and the Fool in hushed tones, not as a love story, but as a warning. They say it is easy to lose what is rare, and even easier to convince yourself it will wait for you. They say trust is not something you hold in your hand, but something you breathe, and once you choke on it, the air is never the same.
The Fool no longer searches. That part of him has gone quiet.
But when the wind moves through the valley just right, I have seen him pause, head tilted, eyes narrowing, as if some faint thread of that strange, foxlike laugh has drifted back to him. And every time, his face tightens with that same expression I saw by the fire years ago: the silent confession that the most precious thing he’d ever been given was also the one he shattered with his own hands.
He told me once, when I was younger and thought I understood the world, "If you ever find a fox, hold it gently. Never grip too hard, never doubt without cause. Foxes don’t return once frightened, and there are some silences you cannot call back."
I did not understand then.
I do now.
The valley has many stories, of storms, of seasons, of strangers who came and went, but none linger like theirs.
Because the Fool’s tale is not about the Fox’s leaving, not really.
It is about how a man can ruin his own salvation without meaning to, how he can mistake the echo of old wounds for truth, and how he can spend the rest of his days breathing in the absence of something that once made him whole.
And sometimes, when the nights are long and the moonlight cuts through the trees, I wonder if the Fox remembers him, too. I wonder if, somewhere beyond the valley, there is another fire, another listener, hearing the story from the other side.
