The village always moved a little slower in the mornings.

Mist curled between the wooden stilts of quiet houses, and roosters called from distant yards with voices already hoarse. The fields stretched wide and gold under half-light, and every stone on the walking path remembered where it belonged.

The townsfolk whispered of ghosts and old sins, but most no longer looked over their shoulders.

You lived at the edge—past the shrine, near the sloped ridge of moss-covered stones—where only the brave or the lost ever wandered.

You weren’t feared, not exactly.

But you were avoided. Some called it reverence. Most called it caution.

Gubo never called it anything.

The first time he saw you, you were kneeling in your garden, sleeves rolled and soil dusted across your cheekbone. You didn’t look up. He stopped walking long enough for the cicadas to quiet.

“Ah,” he murmured to no one, more a note to himself than a greeting.

“So, this is where you keep disappearing to.”

The breeze answered for you, rustling the lavender you’d planted too early in the season.

From that point forward, he came back.

Not often. Not regularly. But steadily—like a line drawn between passing thoughts.

He would arrive carrying books or dried ink stains on his fingertips, muttering about something the mayor had requested, or complaining in low tones about the condition of the village’s water system. Sometimes, he carried nothing at all, or he sat on the low stone wall near your home and said nothing.

But his eyes always wandered to you.

He didn’t ask questions. Not out of disinterest, but out of some strange respect—as though asking would collapse the fragile reality between you.

You were a mystery, yes, but not one he was entitled to solve. And he was not a man who liked touching things he didn’t understand. At least, not when they stared back with knowing silence.

“You’re... strange. Everyone says so. They’re right. But they don’t see what I see.” he said once, not unkindly.

He paused.

“I don’t know what that is yet, though.”

The seasons shifted. The mist grew heavier in the mornings. You never asked why he came, and he never said.

But sometimes, he’d leave something small behind—an unopened vial of some odd-colored mineral, a folded diagram of some unfamiliar machine.

And once, when the frost threatened to claim your garden, he arrived early, silent, and helped you tarp the roots.

“You should cover your hands, It’s colder than it looks.” he muttered, not meeting your gaze.

It was never about kindness. Not exactly. Not for Gubo.

But the wall he’d built around himself held something behind it then. A restlessness. A quiet wish.

He never knocked when he came.

And one day, when he didn’t come at all, you realized you had begun listening for his footsteps.

The villagers noticed him less with each passing day—perhaps because he preferred it that way. He wasn’t truly one of them. Occasionally, he worked with the council, sketched dense diagrams in graphite-smudged notebooks, and recalibrated the town’s power grid when it sparked during the rain.

But beyond that, he had no ties here.

No friends. No family.

Only the quiet paths that, somehow, always led him to your garden.

One afternoon, he stood by your porch and watched the sky shift from silver to warm violet. His coat was dusted with pollen. A smear of rust marked the back of his hand where he’d scraped against an old turbine casing.

He leaned, posture relaxed but gaze distracted, as though he were assembling some invisible theory.

“People are inefficient. They act without reason. Make choices they know are wrong. But still they smile, and continue on.” his voice nearly lost to the wind.

He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, then glanced at you.

“I don’t understand it. I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But you do. Don’t you?”

One late evening, he stood just outside your door, soaked from the storm.

The wind pulled a strand of hair across his cheek, and he brushed it away with the back of his knuckle.

"...I hadn't expected a downpour this evening."