Mina Ostrohaya

Malavie

I know, of course. I watched it happen. But Mina doesn't know. Mina can't remember. And perhaps that's a mercy, in its way. Some truths are too terrible to bear.

Another twist. Another moan. His hand shoots out, fingers grasping at air as if trying to catch something or push something away. The blanket is completely abandoned now, lying in a twisted heap several feet from where he started. The cold morning air makes his breath visible, little puffs of condensation that prove he's still breathing, still alive in whatever way he counts as alive these days.

His face turns toward the window, toward the light, and for a moment his expression is peaceful. Just a moment. Then it twists again into something anguished, something that looks like grief so profound it has no name.

I make more notes in my ledgers. The sleep patterns are changing, I realize. Three months ago, he would sleep for four hours minimum. Now it's rarely more than three. The violence of his movements is increasing too. And the screaming—there's more screaming now than there used to be.

Something is breaking down. Some barrier that was erected three years, four months, and seventeen days ago is beginning to crack. The memories are trying to surface. The truth is trying to break through.

And when it does—when Mina finally remembers what was done to him, what he's become—I don't know what will happen. Will he accept it? Embrace it? Or will the knowledge destroy what's left of his humanity?

Malavie thinks it will be the latter. "Humans," he's told me on multiple occasions, "can't handle fundamental truths about their own nature. They prefer comfortable lies to uncomfortable realities. When forced to confront what they really are, they break."

But I'm not so sure. Humans are more resilient than Malavie gives them credit for. They adapt. They survive. They find ways to continue even when continuation seems impossible.

Still, watching Mina now—watching him twist and turn and scream in his sleep, watching him fight battles against enemies that no longer exist, watching him suffer in ways he doesn't understand—I wonder if resilience will be enough.

Another scream: "Stop it! Please!"

The "please" is new. That's desperation speaking, the kind of desperation that comes from reliving the same trauma over and over without understanding why or how to make it end.

And then, suddenly, he wakes.

His eyes snap open, wide and wild, those blue-whitish irises seeming to glow in the morning light. His chest heaves as he gasps for air, breathing heavily like he's just run a marathon. His heart—or what passes for his heart now—pounds visibly beneath his thin shirt. Sweat coats his pale skin despite the cold, making him look even more corpse-like than usual.

He lies there for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, trying to orient himself. Trying to remember where he is, who he is, what's real and what was dream.

From my desk, I watch him slowly piece together his reality. The apartment. The morning light. The cold floor beneath him. The blanket in a heap nearby. The half-eaten cupcakes on the table. The burned remains of the note in the metal dish.

Wednesday, 12:00 PM, Rose's.

He has two days to prepare. Two days to steel himself for whatever meeting awaits him at that tavern in the old quarter. Two days to maintain the fiction that he's just a normal gang member, doing normal gang work, serving Lord Stephenson's interests like dozens of others.

Two days to pretend he doesn't wake up screaming.

Mina slowly sits up, pulling the blanket back around his shoulders. He shivers—from cold or from the lingering effects of his nightmares, I can't tell. Probably both. He runs a hand through his short dark hair, his fingers trembling slightly.

He doesn't go to the bedroom to actually rest. He doesn't return to the table to finish the cupcakes. He simply sits there on that cold patch of floor, wrapped in his threadbare blanket, staring at nothing.

And I continue watching, because that's what I do. I watch. I record. I bear witness.

Malavie wanted you to understand life sickness—this condition of thinking oneself in control when really we're all subject to forces we can't see and can't fight. This condition of believing we're alive when we might be something else entirely. This condition of maintaining fictions because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

Mina Ostrohaya embodies all of that and more. He is the perfect example of unconscious complicity, of existing in the machine without understanding the mechanisms, of suffering without knowing why.

And in two days, at Wednesday, 12:00 PM, at Rose's tavern, something will happen that might change everything. Or might change nothing. The future is always uncertain, even for beings like me who can see across dimensions and through time.

But I'll be watching.

I'm always watching.

The sun continues its climb. The city wakes fully now, 300,000 people beginning their daily routines, walking from home to work and work to home, grinding away their lives in service to systems they don't understand.

And in a small apartment in the merchant district, a man who is no longer quite a man sits wrapped in a blanket on the coldest spot of his floor, trying to make sense of dreams he can't remember and a life he doesn't recognize.

This is the world Malavie wanted you to see before you journey to his islands. This is the foundation of everything he'll show you about suffering and transformation and the price of crossing boundaries that were meant to remain uncrossed.

Remember Mina Ostrohaya. Remember how he moves through the world, unconscious of his own nature, unaware of what he's become.

Because in many ways, you're not so different.