Parabolis by Eddie Han Read Free Book Online

him, he looked forward to a few more hours to himself. The first few days back, he anticipated, would be busy with seeing people and sorting through the state of affairs at the breaker. There had been little solitude over the past seven years since the Academy, so he relished the time on the Express, alone with his thoughts. He sat back and thought of Sparrow.
    During his first visit back to Carnaval City, three years into the Academy, Dale went to Azuretown looking for Sparrow. After a year of letters trickled back and forth, the sparse communication stopped. Dale had assumed he would find things as he’d left them. But Master T’varche’s forge had been sold to another smith, who had explained to him that Aleksander T’varche practically gave him the business and left the country. Dale went looking for Sparrow’s home, the yellow building into which Dale had never entered. Sparrow was not there. When he asked around, he learned that Sparrow’s mother had passed away under unfortunate circumstances not long after Dale had left for the Academy. No one had seen him since.
    Dale’s thoughts of Sparrow were interrupted by the sight of a young woman, a cleric of the Benesanti, walking down the aisle looking at the seats and the ticket in her hand.
    She was beautiful. The modest appearance required of a Holy Order acolyte did little to hide her simple beauty. Her short, espresso hair was cut in a unisex fashion. She wore a cleric’s habit in standard gray, marked with the red and white crest of the Benesanti on its shoulder. The unflattering dress and the haphazardly cut hair only highlighted her face—fair with blue-gray eyes, full lips, and high-arching eyebrows that gave her the uninviting weightiness of a full presence, concerned more with what she was doing than who she was.
    She took a seat, four rows up, facing Dale. He could neither look away nor sit staring directly at her. He was like a man pained by the setting sun, the unapproachable brilliance, the beauty of what he could not touch, slowly and inevitably slipping away. After thirty minutes of stealing glances, Dale got up and walked to the back of the train in agitation.
    The last time he’d felt like this was when he first set eyes on Johana Sagan, a nurse-in-training at an all-girls school near the Academy. She had chestnut hair and a kind face. Dale couldn’t stop obsessing over her. After months of misery, he had an opportunity to talk to her. Like any boy his age, he feared rejection. Still, he tried. And to his surprise, Johana reciprocated his interest. They began seeing each other as frequently as they could. But with each encounter, the enchantment began to peel away layer by layer until at last, there was no more depth to their notions of love into which they could fall. He realized then that it was never Johana with whom he had been smitten, but rather a meticulously constructed idol in his mind bearing her likeness—a far cry from Johana the real. Before graduation, Dale called off the relationship, vowing never to make the same mistake again. A vow he could hardly remember standing there in the back of the train.
    Darius was right. Dale was a hopeless romantic. When he returned to his seat, he couldn’t help himself from thinking about what might be. His approach, her reaction. For the three remaining hours, this cleric was his singular focus. At one point, he took an unnecessary trip to the toilet in the next car so he could get a closer look. In the bathroom, Dale was disgusted with himself. He was determined to stop obsessing. Then he went right on obsessing until the train finally pulled into Carnaval City’s Central Station.
    As the passengers began to collect their belongings, Dale knew it would likely be the last he’d see of her. If there were to be any chance of either realizing or dispelling what only existed in the realm of possibility, he would have to exercise some sort of bold initiative. When the doors opened, Dale was one of