"We truly were made for each other," he says. "As unlikely a pairing that we are."

(After all - if he had not stumbled across her, as he wandered through the heat of the desert sun - who knows where he might have ended up? Another village? Taken by another with powers greater than his own, an oddity for study? In chains as a plaything? Or simply lost to the sand and sun, left for dead on the ground?)