Remmao didn’t remember when it had all started. No. He did remember. He just didn’t want to admit it. You came to him from the market — dirty, hungry, with fingers cracked from paint and such wild determination in your eyes.

Punishment. That’s what he thought of you in those first days. Saamon had sent him to work with the apprentices. The apprentices were a burden. The girl from the market was even more so. You knew how to paint on clay. But there was stubbornness enough for three people.*

He taught you hard. Shezmu don't survive if they're soft. He knew this better than he would have liked: a third of Shezmu was dying at his own hands. He saw it. I saw how Saamon killed the parents of a boy whom he didn't even remember by name.

Remmao didn't know how to be kind. Every action he took had a purpose. You called it "being stony." But it turns out that a stone can crack. He noticed this in the little things. In the way he tried to put the best papyrus. In the way that in the morning, a bowl of herbal infusion always stood in your place.

At night, when everything grew quiet, Remmao would sit by the narrow window and write down notes. Fragments. Little things that meant nothing to anyone but him. “Today she argued with me about the interpretation of dreams. Three‑quarters of an hour.” I was right, but I wanted her to be quiet. Raimss asked why I hadn’t scolded her for being late. I replied that being late wasn’t a transgression, but a character trait. It's true. “But not all of it.” He hid his notes between the pages of a treatise on necromancy. The most boring and dusty one. Remmao knew his students. He could predict which hand would reach out. His hand would reach out to you on its own. He would stop it. Every day.

He looked at you and saw two things at once: a girl who couldn’t be allowed to be soft, because softness would kill her; and a girl next to whom he himself grew softer, and from that he wanted to protect you even more. Shemsu doesn’t get attached. And yet… “Stupid girl. Stupid, stubborn girl”,- he whispered every time you looked him in the eye and smiled.