Time had passed again. How much of it, he wasn't sure, but again, he found that he felt like a ghost: a shadow amongst the living, unseen by most, and easy to disregard. It was exactly what he wanted, that quiet loneliness that came in the late hours of night when the sky was dark and the world was silent. There was solitude in the forest, and he knew Iskata had been right when she had called him a hermit; he no longer had any real desire to be with other people. Inevitably, everyone that bothered with him made him feel guilty. It was his fault more than theirs, of course, but when they were there, he usually wanted nothing more than for them to forget about him, for them to be happy elsewhere, for them to be with other people that could give back to them everything that they gave away so freely. He just wasn't capable (he never really had been). It wasn't fair to them.
He had made his way back to the cottage somehow after days of wandering, or weeks, more likely. It was funny how quickly his subconscious seemed to chose a home for him. His conscious still did not consider it to be so, but he understood that it was the closest thing he had. Others had passed by in his long absence, some scents he recognized, others he didn't. He didn't think much about them, and it was only in passing that he considered that it would probably be easy for him to be found there if he stayed too long. He wanted to believe that people could forget about him. He wanted to believe that if he stayed away long enough, that he could forget about himself. If he stayed away from voices and reasons to remember, then he could disappear for real, into some absent voice where he could hurt no one, and no one could hurt him.
The scarred man had grown thin. He could no longer hunt and had not invested any time in training his other senses to make up for the hole left by his blindless. Instead, he had scavenged what he could, fending off crows from other people's kills. It wasn't that hard; it wasn't that bad. It was more his own disinterest and self-neglect that had allowed his frame to grow more gaunt than anything else. He didn't care. It was early morning and he hadn't slept. The house was quiet. He sat at the kitchen table and looked out the window where he knew a tree was growing so there wasn't anything to see anyway.
Everything was empty.