What looked like a grown man with a perfect body, the charisma of a dictator and the talent of the world’s greatest hero, was bawling his eyes out in front of two girls, one fifteen and the other barely sixteen.

“So, Jacob had a breakdown because he’s feeling he might fail to save humanity and he want to think of leaving all St. Peter to rot just to feel safer in his intent? Like ‘I can always run away if I want to’? And he did one time? Did I get this right?”

Helena was confused. Honestly, it didn’t sound like anything outrageous to her. She had cried her eyes out in secret multiple times before tests and national math games.

She had still won in the end, though.

And seeing one of the greatest warriors in existence cry like a baby because of Jacob spoke volumes about the latter’s qualifications. If a short kid with barely any talent in this life could bring arguably his complete opposite to his side, what was there to fear?

“He’s afraid,” Juliet said with a sad face, “the stakes are very high, he’s very weak at the moment and he’s not sure he has the time to catch up to what he was in his past life, Helena. And if he fails, he dies, we die, the entire mankind disappears.”

Not exactly a failed test, for sure.

Helena wrinkled her nose and shrugged.

“He needed to get it out of his system. We all need some insurance, some security. If you knew that if you failed the next task everyone and everything would abandon you, you would be in the same state this guy is,” Helena pointed to the crying Hektor.

“And how you give insurance to a person that has the second-weakest talent possible, and just because he managed to create an Alchemical creation never seen before capable of raising his talent?” Juliet spat out.

“Jacob created a new branch of Alchemy, right? With all his foods and stuff. You told me in Ochre, remember? So, he can do that. If he did it to jump to the 2nd level talent, let’s just push harder and get him up to a 10th level talent, no?”

Helena found the problem inexistent. Jacob needed comfort, but he had all the tools he needed. He was strong, smart and had a tremendous ability with the sword, so great he had slain the man in front of them in his past life. So great that, at every opportunity, the man in front of him was the one telling the wondrous tale of how Jacob had killed them.

“It’s just how it is, Helena. You can’t force the guy to feel otherwise. It’s a deep rooted darkness in his heart. You can’t just snap your fingers and expect him to get over it. He needs a win, a real one; he needs to get, for once in his life, something easy. We got constitutions, talents, prospects of growth. He got nothing without having to claw his way from the bottom. He would need a fucking boon from God himself to descend on his lap to make his fucking life brighter. But how do we fucking do that, huh?”

Helena raised a blonde eyebrow and smiled mischievously.

…

People sometimes needed an easy win, something that made them believe they were special for whatever reason they could come up with. Hyper-connectivity had killed a lot of that feeling special, because no one was really special when you looked long enough at your distant neighbour in China who had a five years old son who played piano better than Mozart.

People needed the irrational belief to be entitled to a special life. Telling someone they are not special, even in their little fucked-up world, would kill them. Sometimes literally.

Jacob was sketching some itineraries, some plans and other stuff he didn’t really care about, when something happened.

See, it wasn’t just about the easy win, sometimes. You needed something that would make you believe you could win it all—no, not just believe. Something that would make you absolutely sure that you would win it all.

Élite athletes visualized their victories long and hard, replaying in their mind the moment they would score a goal, cross the finish line before the others, make the match-saving throw.

Normal people, and especially people with mental health problem, lost that. They would only visualize the doomed scenario, over and over, until it broke them, until it made them so not special that they wouldn’t be able to walk straight anymore.

It could be anything in life that gave you that belief.

Maybe a teach in high school was moved to tears during one of your free-writing pieces and you thought you could become the greatest writer. Maybe you scored the luckiest hat-trick in the world and now you believed you could become the next all-star soccer player.

Or it could be that you had a reason big enough to let you believe that even without having someone or something tell you that you were special. Maybe there were people you wanted to be special for, people you would give anything for.

Maybe not people.

Maybe just one person.

Helena entered in the room and started speaking right after, without even giving Jacob a second to say a word.

And whatever was said that day, whatever words would be uttered – and maybe shouted – among the two, would forever stay with them.

It would be a forever intimate moment, something no one should have access to. Something that Jacob refused to share completely even through the Ancestral Bond because such was the importance of what happened.

Some would believe that such a conversation should have lasted hours, maybe days. Instead, it just lasted a few minutes, with fewer words than anyone would ever accept as enough.

Whoever was not either Jacob or Helena would never understand what happened that day. And so, they never spoke of it ever again.

Helena made a promise to Jacob, one so great and so stupid it burned her name over his heart all over, so mighty it erased the sticky black spiral that had enveloped it.

Such was the power of a silly promise made by that just one person.