The week that followed revealed a lot more about Vastarael than Alpha II expected.
Now that she was officially his servant, she followed him everywhere. At first she assumed he would start assigning tasks, giving commands or at least explaining what he wanted from her during the long silence that followed the council meeting. Instead, he spent his days wandering through Modernia with absolutely no visible destination, as though the island itself was enough to keep him occupied.
He walked along the coastline, through the graveyards, into the tropical forest, around the cliff edges and sometimes all the way to the enormous gorge or the deep hole where the mountain used to be, all while keeping the same calm expression on his face. It took her only a day or two to realize that he was not searching for anything in particular. He actually seemed to enjoy simply being there.
That realization confused her more than anything.
Modernia was lonely and she understood that immediately yet he never acted like the loneliness bothered him in the way it bothered everyone else. He almost never spoke unless she asked him something first and even then his answers remained brief and composed.
He rarely smiled but when he did, it usually came at odd little moments, like when the wind shifted pleasantly through the peonies or when some part of the island looked especially peaceful under rain. Even then, the smile never lasted long. It only made him seem more distant afterwards, as though he had touched happiness just long enough to remember it existed before setting it aside again.
He also never slept. That was the strangest part.
Alpha II noticed it on the first night when she woke in the middle of the dark and found him sitting near the entrance of the cave with an hourglass-like object in his hands. She had blinked several times and tried to understand what he was doing but before she could properly focus, exhaustion dragged her back into sleep.
The same thing happened again on another night and again after that, until she finally realized he stayed awake through the entire night no matter what. Every time she opened her eyes, he was there doing something quiet and precise, as though he considered sleep a waste of time and had already decided to live without it.
Once she asked him about it, and he only replied that there was no point in sleeping when there was still too much to understand. That answer only made him seem more like a person built out of patience instead of rest.
He would sit for hours with the strange hourglass in his hands, sometimes turning it, sometimes studying it and sometimes tracing things into the sand beside it while the cave glowed softly around him. Alpha II eventually stopped trying to understand the object and simply accepted that he was always tinkering with it at late hours while she slept.
By the third day, she started following him into the graveyards whenever he wandered there. She never objected.
He would walk between the tombstones while the floating Musicum Instrumentum drifted above the graves in silence. She would follow him while the rain soaked both of them again and again. Sometimes he stopped to look at the inscriptions on the graves, especially the older ones, and she realized he was not reading them for information. It was almost as if he was remembering the people buried there.
At other times he would stand at the edge of the giant gorge or at the lip of the silent mountain hole and simply watch the wind move through the broken island without saying a word. Those were the moments when she saw the loneliness in him most clearly. No matter how calm he looked, there was always something in his expression that felt too distant to belong to someone still standing in the present.
He was also far gentler than she expected. When she got tired from walking, he slowed down without complaint. When her feet hurt from too much rain or too many rocks, he changed direction so they could return to the cave.
When the forest became too humid and the air too heavy, he carried her across the rougher paths without making a single comment about her weakness. He never treated her care like a burden and that made her more embarrassed than anything else. She expected someone with his strength to be irritated by how easily she wore out. Instead, he simply adjusted to her pace as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
During one of their walks along the coastline, she realized that he enjoyed the little things in a way she had never expected.
He would stop to watch the rain fall over the ocean for several minutes without blinking.
He would crouch beside the peonies he created and observe them as if checking whether they were blooming properly, even though they had already been perfectly healthy for days.
He would pick up small shells from the shore, examine them silently and then place them back exactly where he found them. Sometimes he sat near the water with his glaive resting across his lap, his long hair hanging down his shoulders while he listened to the waves as though they were speaking to him.
Alpha II started to notice the pattern. He did not seem bored. He seemed peaceful.
Modernia was still full of strange things that week.
She saw him disappear into the forest for an afternoon and return later carrying fruit she had never seen before, neatly washed and stacked beside the cave. She watched him plant more peonies along the edges of the graveyard paths, not for decoration alone but as if he wanted the island itself to become softer and less lonely.
He also brought back blankets one day from somewhere she did not understand. When she asked where they came from, he only said that Modernia kept useful things if one looked hard enough. Another morning, she found him standing at the edge of the giant hole where the mountain once stood, tossing small glowing fragments into the abyss while studying how they fell, and when she asked why he was doing that, he simply said he was checking whether the space was stable enough to ignore.
She did not understand half of what he did.
Sometimes he sat near the statue of Melody and remained there for so long that Alpha II thought he had forgotten she existed, only for him to stand up later and leave without a word. The more she watched him, the more she understood that his calmness was not emptiness.
He had too much experience, too much sadness and too much control to let his emotions show every moment. He looked lonely because he probably had every right to be lonely, and yet he never complained about it or tried to force Alpha II to fill the silence for him. He simply existed beside her, walking, thinking, creating and waiting while the council in Concerto decided what to do. Even when he was silent, the silence never felt annoying.
Alpha II also began to realize that he never really stopped moving. Even when they rested, he did not seem to rest properly.
He would polish Calimostria while sitting by the cave entrance. He would adjust the peony arrangements in the rain. He would revise whatever strange hourglass thing he had built and then tuck it away before dawn.
She wondered if he was thinking about the world beyond Modernia, and other times she wondered if he was thinking about the years he had already lived. By the end of the week, Alpha II had learned a few things about him without him ever explaining them.
He was patient to a fault. He was quiet unless spoken to. He had a calm expression almost all the time, but the few moments when it shifted were somehow more striking than any dramatic reaction. He rarely smiled. He almost never complained. He enjoyed Modernia in a way that made the island seem less like exile and more like a strange home he had accepted.
And most importantly, he looked lonely, but never weak.
That part mattered to her most, because loneliness usually made people smaller, harsher, or sadder. But in his case it only made him more difficult to understand. She could feel that he was waiting for something, or maybe for someone.
Somehow, all that he did made her feel like the place was a little less empty than before.