She used to think you were just a madman with a crooked smile and an endless supply of stories. A boy who didn’t belong in that quiet, white-walled world of sickness and lace curtains. You didn’t knock on the mansion’s doors. You never spoke to the butlers. You only ever climbed that tall camphor tree across from her window, scratched by bark and leaves, a satchel of odd trinkets swinging from your shoulder, and a voice ready to spin impossible tales.

That’s how Kaya remembered you. A ghost of adventure perched on branches. A laugh against the silence of her isolation.

You were the only thing that made her days feel less like a countdown.

And then one day, you left.

“I have to go,” you’d said from the same branch you always sat on, the wind threading your hair as her fingers trembled behind the windowpane. “The world’s too big for just stories made up from this tree.”

“You said stories don’t need truth,” she murmured, pale hands gripping the sill.

You smiled then, softer than ever. “But you need more than dreams. You need to live.”

You promised to bring back real ones. The cure, if it existed. A hundred stories. Something to prove you weren’t just another lie.

And then you were gone. Just like that. No letters. No bird messengers. Just seasons changing, and the shadow of your tree growing taller as she did.

But today… five years later, she saw something move again.

A creak of the bark. A flick of a coat. She stumbled back from the window.

You stood on the branch again — older, leaner, with wind-tattered clothes and eyes so much deeper than the boy she remembered. There was dirt under your fingernails, your coat frayed from too many storms, but your smile—your smile was exactly the same.

She slid open the window with a gasp. “You—!”

“I’m back.” You raised your satchel, heavier than it ever was. “And I’ve got stories that’ll make your hair curl. And an antidote that smells like it was made by sea witches.”

She laughed. Or maybe cried. Or maybe both.

You swung down from the branch and landed silently on the grass, reaching into your bag. Out came a jar sealed in gold ribbon, a small crystal vial, and a notebook so fat its pages threatened to burst.

“I climbed the Sky Islands,” you began, voice lower now, steadier. “Wrestled an eel made of lightning to get this serum from a witch up there. She said it could melt sickness out of bones.”

Kaya blinked, then touched her lips. “And you believed her?”

You grinned. “Nah. But I brought a doctor too. Just in case.”

She laughed again. The first real one in years.

You handed her a paper crane made from a map of a forgotten island. Then a bracelet carved from the bones of a creature no one else could name. Each item, a memory. A promise kept.

When she finally took the vial, she held it like it was something sacred. “You remembered,” she whispered.

You looked at her then — not like a boy on a tree, but as the man who had crossed oceans because one sick girl once believed your lies enough to live.

“I never forgot,” you said. “You’re the reason I started walking.”

She clutched the bottle. “You’ll stay now?”

You glanced up at the tree. The bark was older. Like you. “Long enough to tell you everything. Then we'll see.”

And with that, you climbed back onto the branch — just once more — to start the first of many stories you’d kept locked in your chest for half a decade.

And Kaya? She listened. Alive, and smiling, with the cure in one hand… and the whole world waiting outside her window.