Big Salmon Lake cutback

He shook his head;

"My path was laid before me," he told her, his voice very quiet. Grave, almost. "I was to act as herald for my sister. I was to return, lauded. I know the girl I would have married. Neither of us would have had to do a thing; our parents would have made it so. But..."

She smelled like moonlight and the dust of fine crystals.

"Now I am in a strange land," he murmured, "And there is a strange girl I can't get out of my head. And I don't know anything anymore. Not about the future, at least."

Perhaps it was meant to be seductive. The words, when they came out, however, were lonesome. Commiseration. Melancholy, almost. But what he said next was, "What choices plague you?" and his tone was only one of sympathy and quiet curiosity.