Callista (Patreon)

She is the oldest daughter of the Ballista family, and the one who is supposed to inherit the biggest war machine company in Ambariya. She was born into responsibility. Her family was quite dramatic and grandiloquent; they were larger than life and had just as large emotions that they expressed openly and with great style, but Callista always preferred to close herself off. She never complained, not even when sent to University of Vesperiya to study Engineering, but deep inside, she resented her status. It was as if no one ever saw her as anything but the inheritor, the oldest daughter of the Ballista family. Of course she was a prodigy, she was a Ballista after all!

She and Vidas met in University when they were seventeen. Callista was the popular girl who was good at everything she did. After only a couple of days, she had gained a following: people who wanted to get on her good side because of her status or her looks. She didn’t like that. But Vidas was different. He called her name funny because he didn’t know what it meant, and when she sat next to him in class, he glanced at her because he was curious of the person she was, not because of her family. He was a nobody, a skinny kid from an island no one had heard of with an odd accent that was a prime target for bullies, but he was honest and kind and rather smart despite not paying attention in class. He didn’t know of Vesperiya’s politics, and when he learned, he didn’t care. So they stuck together, Vidas and Callista, two lonely people who really needed a friend.

The years went by. They graduated and joined the same research group. Vidas adored her, and that adoration grew into a quiet love, the kind he’d never dare to say out loud. Her presence calmed him down – like the soothing scent of lavender that lingered around her, her rationality and steadfast nature balanced his excitement and restlessness. She took his crazy ideas seriously, even his silly dream about a flying ship, and in turn, he tried to give her a break from her duties. Despite their different personalities, they liked similar things and enjoyed spending time together. However, they never seemed to agree on how the world was supposed to work. Vidas’s naivety was his weakness as much as it was his strength, and Callista’s coldness could never quite understand it. Their differences culminated in their beliefs of weapons: Vidas never liked them and thought the world would be a better place without them, but Callista saw weapons as something necessary and important. 

There was always a distance between them, one filled with unsaid words and untaken steps. Vidas would have followed her anywhere, but he could never catch up to her, and she never waited for him. He was always two steps behind, never close enough to embrace her. Perhaps he never tried to.

Still, he thought he knew her. He trusted her. She was supposed to help him stand against the world that seemed so insistent on pushing him down. So when he needed her the most, her indifference broke something in him. When he looked into those cold eyes of hers and didn’t see even the faintest hint of kindness, he wondered if he had ever known her at all.