The Wanderer Tien'gathuin

[thesorrow]

I write to inform you, Lord Sarius, that your son has been espied in Rauvinswatch Keep of Luruar, and then again in Nesme.

One of my scouts trailed him south and west, all the way to Waterdeep, but lost track of him there. What troubles me is that he did not come to Moonvines; if he had, I surely would have more answers for you.

We of Moonvines can do little more for you, I'm afraid, except remain watchful in the event of his return.

I will personally prevail upon what favor the Father graces me with in asking for your son to find his way home to you and your Lady.

With sweet water and light laughter,
-Larian Althembriel, High Speaker of Corellon

[thesorrow]

Sarius-

If I recall correctly, your youngest son just trudged right past me here in the Gate. That he didn't recognize or seem to remember me came as rather a surprise, though I didn't trail him to push the matter.

I did, of course, verify that it was him. He's somewhat indiscreetly been inquiring after someone named 'Minion Copperhand'; if this name has any pertinence to you, do kindly have one of your mages forward your response to me without hesitation.

Oh yes, lest I forget, do you still happen to have that particular shard of that thing we're not talking about ever again? It's an entirely unrelated matter, but I've found something similar and, if you could forward that too, I'd like to compare puzzlepieces.

Tell your wife I'm still the better looking one.

-K. *A hawk in flight is elegantly drawn beside the initial*

[thesorrow]

You might look at me and think you know me. You don't.

White as an albino, eyes of a dark-dweller; yeah, you might think you know what it means. Maybe you'll even think you know where I've been.

You don't.

But, go ahead and think whatever you want; I won't correct you.

Call me anything you like. I've heard it before; I've heard it all before. You're not clever enough to come up with something the fools who've stood there before you, thinking they knew what you think you know now, didn't think of. And if you are?

I don't much care, because everything you know about me wouldn't fill a thimble. Call me fallen, call me forsaken, call me ugly, call me anything; believe anything you want about it. I'll be right here, not giving two spits at the moon.

Why? Because I've been there, berk. I was young when most of your ancestors weren't yet dreams and lights in the gods' eyes.

I've stood where you stand, thinking I really knew something; I didn't. Just like you, I was ignorant and thought I was really something.

Well, I wasn't, and neither are you. I've known men, elves, dwarves, hin, gnomes and elsewise alike who'd forgotten more of magic, of history and of life in general than you'll likely survive to figure out.

Yeah, that's right berk; I've been to the hells and back. I've died for what I love and I've watched all I love die despite, and all before most of your parents were even born yet.

But you go right ahead and keep looking at me like that. I might be busted up and at the bottom of my game again, but I tell you what; I've been here before. It's like they say out on the wheel, kid; rule of threes.

This is life number three. You don't know what that means? That's your problem.

So, you just keep looking at me like that. Everything you say is right, you know everything and of ~course~ your oh-so-vaunted ability to kill with a word, topple dragons with a flick of your wrist or maybe sneeze and turn Elminster's beard lilac impresses everyone.

Just don't be surprised if I'm the last one laughing, kiddo. Whether it's with you should you figure out how much of a fool you are before it kills you, or at you when life takes your knees out from under you and does a tap-dance on your cranium, I'll be laughing.

Yeah, that's right; laughing. Either with you or at you- just which is your call.

I'll tell you this much though.

All the power in the world; all the magic, the mightiest blade, the most bedazzling armor, the fanciest trinkets; it doesn't mean a thing. Blink your eyes and it can all be gone before you're halfway done.

What're you left with then, eh kid? What've you got when everything you ever thought you knew; that you ever thought mattered; evaporates like a pierced illusion all around you?

What do you do when it does it all over again, just when you thought you were figuring life and yourself out again?

Maybe you'll get to find out someday.

Keep looking at me like that, and I might just make a point of being there when you do.

[thesorrow]

It took me half a year and more wandering than I really felt up to, but I finally found her.

Here in Cormyr, of all the places, following clues years cold and calling on allies fifteen years in the belief that I was dead.

It was worth it though. All of it. These six months of trudging around playing sleuth, surviving Viridian for a decade and a half; all of it.

Just seeing her again was worth it; hearing her voice again, doubly so. She's alive, she got over my death-apparent and, somehow, she thought I'd give a damn about her trysts in the interim.

I don't know how to tell her that none of that's important to me; never really was, still isn't. After all we've respectively been through, nothing else matters but that she's alright.

Chrys is still around and still taking care of her. If I'd have known all those years ago just how important it'd be when I hired that veritable amazon to be Myn's bodyguard, I'd have thanked every god I could name.

It always comes to the 'What now?' of it though. The initial shock wears off, the realities sink in, the tears are shed, the kinks of past-meets-present become apparent...and it always comes back to that one question.

What now?

I've stood amongst the mighty, and I've fallen as far as a body can fall. I've been broken in every way, and I'm still breathing. Everything that didn't matter's been stripped away from me; poured down the abyssal blade that removed Viridian from the face of the multiverse.

Why it didn't kill me, I may never know. The cambion said it was a blade that could kill anything mortal, but that it'd cost the life of the wielder to do it. But I lived. It ripped everything else away from me...but I'd already survived that once, at the hands of Radamar and the treachery of my brothers.

The rule of threes springs to mind. Gods, but it all feels so damn eerie, to be in the heart of whatever this maelstrom my existence's become. I've been high and I've been torn down, only to crawl back again and be torn down again.

Here I am, once again, still crawling. Why the hells don't I just give up and die? I know the answer to that even as I write those words; I don't want to. Here, in this maelstrom, I am free.

It's not a curse. It's an opportunity.

I'm no longer what I was; what I was ...was flawed. First time around, I was a fool of the worst sort. Second time around...I improved. I was still a fool.

...But now it comes to it. Pull number three on the great wheel of mystery; door number three on the great stage of life.

I've been here before. I've been right here, at the bottom of Mount Life, and I know what paths I've walked before.

It all adds up. I know beyond doubt what matters to me; I understand myself in ways no one who hasn't been where I've been can.

So, what now?

...I keep breathing. I keep breathing, I keep crawling, I keep bleeding, screaming and kicking, and every time I do, I'll get a little higher up that mountain.

Bring it on, life. I'm eager to see what new tricks you pull on me this time.

Every trick you play, I learn. Every time you rip me down, I learn. Every time you beat the fire right out of me until I'm nothing but a spark, I keep crawling back for more, because every time, that spark that is the heart and soul of me gets a little wiser, a little smarter, a littler tougher in all the ways not even death and no amount of the world's worst agonies can stop.

But you better be ready for me this time, Life, 'cause this time, I'm coming at you with a grin.

Let's dance.

[thesorrow]

~The hidden vale of Moonvines, of the Silver Marches, circa 55 years ago~

Wind whispered through the autumn-painted leaves. A still, chilled scent had blown in with the last rain. The next would be snow...or maybe the one thereafter. It'd been a long time since he'd paid attention to it, in any case, and doing so now wasn't making life any easier.


His kindred made their way about the grove beyond where he sat, minding their own business, undoubtably aware that he was there, but simply giving it no mind. He was always either there or not, at the base of that one particular tree, humming that same haunting melody to himself.

Some few had admonished him to try not brooding so much; to actually think about things and not just roll the same mournful memories around in his head. He reflected back on it as he sat there, in the canopy-filtered light of the setting sun. It'd been an admonishment he hadn't so much asked for as allowed, and despite still not being altogether sure he wanted their opinions, it just didn't sit right in his head to condemn themfor telling him the truth as they saw it.

Never the less, it was all so much more easily said than done. He just didn't have it in him to truly say goodbye to the memories, to begin with. Being here in this place, by this tree she'd told him of so many times, he at least imagined that he could hear the echoes of her laughter, and as soon as that sensation hit, he was done.

There was just no escaping the sense of loss, nor stopping it once it set in. Every time he'd come here, he'd remember every moment they'd spent together; there in his mind, he didn't want to forget, or let go, or say goodbye.

He'd add a new curse upon the drow every time he came here, for robbing the world of her; for robbing him of his best friend and lifemate.

It'd be thirty two years soon, since she'd been waylaid and ambushed by drow assassins. Thirty two years since he'd last seen her face, or felt the warmth of her breath on his neck.

How could he let that go? Why should he even want to? What purpose would it serve, to say goodbye?

A friend of his, now over a decade returned to the earth in death's embrace, had once told him that only he could end the pain, and only when he truly wanted to. It didn't make much more sense to him now than it had then, though.

How? It always came back to that one deceptively impossible question, and getting stuck on that question usually set a fire in his soul that only crushing the life out of a steadily increasing battery of foes could momentarily quench.

As usual, the fading evening sunlight held for him no answers. The gentle whispering of the wind through the trees in this serene place spoke no secret wisdom to him...or if it did, he couldn't hear it.

Not that he hadn't tried to. It just either wasn't there to hear or he wasn't ready to hear it if it was there at all, and no amount of clearing his mind and meditating or flying into a rage and cursing ridiculous threats to-do with stabbing the muttering wind and mockingly serene tranquility of this place in any eyes it might possess changed that.

Thirty two years it'd be, in less than a month, and though nothing else was certain, he knew at least that he needed to answer that impossible question somehow.

If he didn't, someway, someday, it'd be many centuries and thirty two years, and he'd still find himself here, singing that same song she used to sing for him, holding onto the ever-warm, forever-gone recollections that were slowing killing him.

Evening gave way to twilight, and twilight to dusk. Nobody said as much, but everyone aware of his presence at the edge of the grove knew he'd be there all night long.

So it was that...he was, and as always, he was gone with the first rays of dawn. He'd be back though. He knew it, and they knew it.

It was only a matter of when.

[thesorrow]

~The Frost Hills of the Silver Marches, circa 17 years ago~

The darkness of the chasm, thick with frost and blasted by eternally gusting, snow-laden winds beckoned to him. High on his cliff top, buried in the very snow that flew through the air, he watched.

This was the game of waiting, and he played it well.

Two days he'd waited, after roaming far north soon after the Council of Commons' celebration. Word had been muttered by a caravanier that oddly-disposed elves taking great pains to disguise their features were stumbled across.

They were lost, the caravan master said, and seeking shelter from the cold. The gruff dwarf had paid them little heed after directing them to a cache cavern he'd used a time or three. They were invited to make use of the supplies kept there, and at their own peril if something else had made a lair of it, as occasionally happened with all the giants roaming around.

To the Hunter, it was the scent of the trail, and he followed it admirably, to the very place he'd bunkered in and let the snow cloak him.

He'd seen signs of their passage, of course; a crude lean-to left in their wake, more than one failed attempt at firebuilding, and a hole chopped in a streams icy surface, barely frozen over anew by the time he'd gotten to it.

If these were elves, they were crippled in their understanding of how to survive. They evidenced no more awareness of their environment than a base human child might.

The scent began, therein, to smell increasingly of drow. He'd seen it all before; drow raiders, trained to fight in the light but otherwise generally crippled in navigating or surviving in terrain as alien to them as the Underdark was to any surfacer, bumbling around as best they were able.

It didn't happen often. Most such raiders were often self-compelled to come surfaceward. Any sent on genuine missions of destruction were far the better trained, prepared and deadly for it.

This time...it seemed to be a case of the prior, but he waited, watching, to be sure.

Two days had passed. He welcomed the hunger that panged at his gut, after the first day. He would eat when victory, in whatever form it might take, was his. Until then, it would remind him that he was a Hunter, and predators don't eat unless they achieve victory over their prey.

Thirst was no issue. Nor was warmth. The snow near his mouth was water whenever he wished it, and only a great fool would roam these bitter-cold lands without adequate defense against the killing chill.

Two days, and he had seen several heavily-coated beings come near to the cavern entrance, peer out of it and withdraw.

They were waiting. Waiting, as if the storm forever hurling ice and hoary cold around these treacherous hills and valleys would ever abate.

His method of approach would be simple. As a lone sojourner, he would make his approach...and from there, he would simply make it up as circumstances demanded.

He'd already planted three sonic charges in the heavy drifts, seated in ice seams beneath the snow, above the cavern entrance. It was a gamble; everything was a gamble; but the time to make his move had not yet come.

It would make itself known only in it's appointed moment, and his patience paid off. Night fell, and at the dawn of the third night, he saw the glimmer of fire from within the cavern.

They'd finally either figured out how to make one or found something to burn.

With no further hesitation, he produced two waxed, waterproofed scrolls from his satchel. One of magical flight, the other of lesser invisibility.

Such things were simple enough for him to work out. He'd almost completed the training to be a genuine wizard, in his youth, though the only thing he'd retained of any of it had been patchwork know-how of completing spell-scrolls, activating magical wands and other such rigmarole.

Most any mage would surely snicker at his half-trained, sub-apprentice degree of mastery over such arcane matters, but he'd broadened it in the centuries since. Adapted it, made it work for him, and with little enough effort, both scrolls burned to ash, the magic upon them successfully completed and directed.

Like anything, there was an art to it, and he failed little in appreciating it for what it was.

Rising from his snowdrift by virtue of the magical flight, he let the wind strip from him caked, lingering snow. All the invisibility in the world would be amusingly useless if he were dropping clumps of white along the way, floating or not.

The wind did what he desired of it most adequately, however. He knew it would; he'd done this before.

Without another moment spared, he drifted like a wraith through the gusting, snow-driving wind, halting just inside the cavern entrance.

He attempted to listen, then, as any hunter would, but between the wind and his helm-covered ears, he couldn't make anything out relative to his prey. It was just as well, he reasoned.

Floating inward a bit further, he took the time to let his eyes adjust as much as they would. That damned fire was a damning thing; any number of foes could hide in the generated shadows, and they often did if they were at all wise.

It mattered little however, which he quickly saw. There were seven, huddled around the pathetic little fire, wrapped in rough cotton blankets.

Seven pairs of ebon-skinned, delicate hands were outstretched to that fire, gleaning it's warmth.

There was no chill in the icy valley that could burn and freeze the flesh like the ire of the soul, and he spent the next minute watching.

Watching and forcing himself to do it; to watch, to wait.

He had correctly identified his prey. Drow, of the most foolish variety, who now huddled around a campfire whilst waiting for a storm to break that had been raging and never-ending for more centuries than history bespoke.

They would die here if he simply walked...or as the case was, floated...away.

It was then that one of the huddled figures spoke. Not in undercommon, nor even in the more formal corruption of elven drow typically used.

It was in elven. High Elven, as formally enunciated as if it had been learned out of a book by one with at least the tongue to properly effect it.

"Momma...I'm hungry.", the sorrowfully young male voice thusly said.

One of the pairs of ebon hands reached for another, smaller pair and closed around them. "I know, El'hediel. Be strong for momma though. Help will come."

Not but sixty feet away, unseen and unsuspected by those pathetic figures, a world, as known by the unsuspected hunter, shook.

Had his ears just lied to him, he asked himself?

Did they know their death had come for them, and sought to effect one last horrible trick to play upon any vestige of foolish mercy they might generate in that death?

If it was so, the female's voice didn't echo it in any way he could detect.

"Let us sing a song." she said. "The one Raravawien taught us."

There were a few nods around the blanket-huddled gathering, and the hunter unseen's world just kept shaking, joined therein by his hands.

"But why, momma?" the child's voice asked. "Why should we sing? I want to eat something...is there nothing left here for us to eat?"

Something stabbed the Hunter in the chest, with the words that followed. T'was neither blade nor spell, but realization, and shards falling from the edges of the world he knew.

"There is nothing left for us here but hope, El'hediel. She said that help would come, and our faith would guide it to us." the mother replied to the child, though her voice wavered with chill only poorly staved away.

With a sorrowful sigh, the boy's shrouded head nodded a little, in acquiescence.

Sixty feet away, the Hunter's mind was locked in war unlike any it had engaged itself in...in years. A war that spilled into his very soul.

It was a lie. A fabricated, cunning drow lie. They were waiting to play upon the bleeding-heart pity of surfacers too naive to know their demonic ways. All this pathetic mewling and stumbling about was a farce, to lure his own very sort into false senses of security.

Every fiber of his being screamed it. Screamed and screamed, but the fire of hatred...was no longer there within him.

It shook him even still. Terribly.

Though he moved only in the faint trembling of his hands, he listened outwardly, and warred inwardly.

This is what he had asked for, was it not?

This is what he had asked Bruenor of...was it not?

The dwarf-lord's words rang in his mind, even then, even as he thought back upon them.

"It sounds tae me, lad, like ye're jes lookin' for evidence of what ye're already wantin' to believe." Bruenor had said.

He didn't want to believe it, did he? He wanted it to be simple again.

...Didn't he?

It was right about then that the drow mother's voice, barely above a whisper, began to sing. In her voice, there was hope and fear of hope's failing alike.

But that was not what rammed the intangible blade straight through his chest, pierced the heart of the Hunter and ripped his shaking world right down to it's knees.

It was the words, and the faintly carried tune, there in the chill, still cavern air, wrought in trembling, too-practiced formal high elven.

"Sink into your mother's arms; the womb that gave you birth.
Let her take your secrets back...and lay them in the earth.
Let her take you in her arms...let her take you home.
...Let her take you home. Let her...take you...home.
Give to her the gifts she gave...of flesh, and breath, and bone.

Sink into your lover's arms; the womb that made you whole.
Let her waters slake the thirst...you carry in your soul.
Let her take you in her arms...let her take you home.
...Let her take you home. Let her...take you...home.
Leave to her the dreams you made...of fire, steel and stone.

Sink...into...your mother's arms.
Sink into your lover's arms...

Sink into your sister's arms; the womb you need not know.
Let her fire consume the frame...of what you were before.
Let her take you in her arms...let her take you home.
...Let her take you home. Let her...take you...home.
Leave to her the agonies...of when you were alone.

And sink into your mother's arms.
Sink into your lover's arms.
Sink into your sister's arms.

And from her arms...fly home."


He knew that song.

He knew that song from his mother's own lips. The most beautiful of songs that she would sing.

How?

Why?

Even after they had lapsed into silence, the hunter floated there, shaking.

Everything was wrong. That song- how could they know his mother's song?!

It didn't happen quite all at once, but over the course of the minutes that followed, the Hunter began to weep.

Not out of pity for this sorry lot, nor even out of any sort've sudden epiphany or revelation, though neither of those were entirely out of the picture.

He was just that confused. So confused and so mentally brought to his knees, by a -song- they could not know by any means he could begin to contrive, that he felt as a child.

Never-the-less, a hunter does not hesitate, and he let both the flight and the invisibility spells drop; more to point, he essentially threw their magics from him as best he was able, dropping to his heavy-mailed feet with a comparatively resounding *CTHANK* that caused all seven drow to startle, then scramble to gather up what weaponry was available to them.

He didn't know what to do.

Right then and there, the Hunter failed. He hesitated, his hands firmly clamped on his undrawn warblades.

A twisted, torn scream emanated from his helmet, further jolting the four drow who'd come to the fore, wielding blades of common iron. The other three were scrambling towards the rear of the cavern; one larger, two smaller, with the larger; the mother; keeping herself between the threat...and, apparently, the children.

What little remained of his world, brought already to it's knees, died a silent death in the moment that followed. An ignoble death, delivered by the fearful faces of the four males brandishing blades in near numb-with-chill hands forth.

They would fight him to their assured death...but their eyes were locked not upon his helmet, but his armor.

The armor of a Dharwithilia, engraven with hundreds of epithets of their own destruction, and the death of drow in it's entirety.

He had hesitated, and so then did they.

There was no longer a Hunter to respond to their failure to make good on his mistake, however.

Again he screamed, and again they flinched back a half-step.

In their eyes, he saw himself.

There was only one monster here.

The third attempt at a scream came out as a choked, ripping sob.

From the back of the cavern, it was echoed by the terrified sob-whimpers of both a male and a female voice, and had there been even a single shred of his world left, it would have been thence obliterated.

He fell, trying to scream, to his knees. He wanted to scream; to scream until the world exploded around him.

All he could manage, then and there, was what surely must've sounded to be the most gutteral and half-mad of choking sounds, and the world's only response was it's continuance of the ever-gusting wind beyond the cavern's maw.

The eyes of the males before him just kept stabbing him with their confusion and fear.

"WHY?!" he roared in the same tongue they'd been speaking, all at once, flinging himself to his feet with tremendous force. Again, the four males jolted.

"Why?..." he repeated, feeling suddenly exhausted; weary to and beyond his very core.

It was all just too much. Far, far too much. He wanted to close his eyes and make it all go away.

And so he did, in the form of wheezing one last choked sob through his raw throat and tipping over face-first before the thoroughly terrified, confused males.

His final thought, 'ere welcome darkness took his senses from him, was simply a repeat of what he'd already snarled.

"Why?"

***

"Is that...the help?" one of the males asked of the monstrously armored elf. After he'd collapsed following that...fit of madness, as there surely was no other way to describe it, they'd disarmed him and put him in the back of the cavern. Had they any rope, they'd have bound him as well, as clearly he was somehow insane, but lacking such things, they had to settle on moving their fire to keep a closer watch on him.

Lir'lathia shook her head slowly, her gaze seldom straying from the heavy-armored figure. She knew, of course, what had found them; the armor told anyone who could read it exactly what they were looking at.

A Slayer. Raravawien had warned her of such slayers, as dangers beyond anything else the surface they'd all fled to might offer.

Their story had also been explained to her.

"I do not know, Ulthien." She responded belatedly. "If nothing else, he's well supplied, and thus now are we."

"You can say that again." Another of the drow males, who'd been rummaging through the slayer's belongings the whole time, piped up with. "There's more magic and equipment, medicine and everything we could've thought to need here. And maps! If we can figure out how to read these, we might be able to find Misthaven!"

"I still think we should kill him." Another of the males spoke up. "He's a slayer. You've asked that we stay our hand until he wakes, but think, Lir'lathia. If we give him a chance to gather his senses, what is to say he will not slaughter us all, including your children."

At this, the ebon-skinned Eilistraeen shook her head. "That is the way of the very places and kin we fled, Domoriel. Remember that we are no longer slave to that way. Mark also that it is...quite possible that he could have attacked us, but didn't."


The male snorted, but his heart wasn't in it. He knew she was right, of course, but the urge remained. Flicking his gaze from Lir'lathia to the prone stranger, he decided that he would go along with her mercy and just keep his blade close.

The cavern, using some of the Slayer's supplies, was almost cheerfully warmed. Dense packages of woodshavings, wax and who knew what else burned hot and long, and all the fire oil the elf had carried was a boon in getting a fire going like little else could be.

Between that and the astounding amount of varied foodstuffs carried in said slayer's obviously magical satchel and pouches, all of them were feeling considerably more rescued than anything else. Moreover, they'd had adequate opportunity to sample the countless varieties of liquids kept in fancifully decorated bottles, in a corner of that magical satchel of his.

Little did they know or have cause to yet suspect that the slayer had awoken long before. He was again conscious when they'd been sorting through his belongings. Aware and awake as they'd spent the past handful of hours discovering his stores of food, wines from across Faerun and various other things.

He was just too numb to care. To move, stir, speak or even open his eyes. While a hunter might've taken pride in feigning unconsciousness for that long, and that well, it was no merit of his that made it seem so real.

He just didn't care to do more than let his body breath as it would, though had it stopped and been in his power to start up again, he wouldn't have.

The past hours of listening to them, in this eerie state of absolute detachment, had at least made a few things clear to him.

Obviously, they'd kept him alive. Untortured, unrestrained despite having surely by now found his adequate supplies of cable, rope and otherwise, even set near the fire.

They were doing as wary, hungry, lost but well-meaning people anywhere might do. With his eyes closed, it made so much more sense; seemed almost laughable that he'd thought there were drow here at all.

This rather reinforced why he hadn't opened them even the tiniest bit the whole time, beyond his eerie, serene state of detachment. It was a good reason to go along with no urge to do so in the first place, as it went.

The children; by now he'd identified two to be amongst these seven entire; were thoroughly thankful for the food and fire. One of them had even drawn near enough to thank him and moreover whisper, "I hope you get better so you can help us find our new home."

The sheer irony of it all evaded him just yet, however. His eyes were shut...and there were no drow here.

He knew better, logically, but he needed to believe it to be otherwise for now. He needed that crutch, for the time being, lest it all come rushing back and overwhelm him anew.

Nothing, otherwise, stirred him. They had concluded to wait until he awoke before deciding anything further, and so it essentially depended upon when he would get around to opening his eyes.

He'd asked for truth. All these years, he'd asked for it, and now that he'd found it...he didn't know what to do with it. It was both as he'd feared and suspected, and the sheer, living irony of how something can be both suspected and shocking was both apparent and inexplicable to him now more than ever prior.

His eyes would have to open sometime, of course. At least this one last step was in his hands, to make when he chose, no matter that he had no choice but to make it sometime.

When he opened his own light-burned eyes, and turned his head slightly, he saw three pairs of red-lavender eyes looking back at him.

Funny that he hadn't felt them watching him, though it seemed they had been. The mother; Lir'lathia, he'd heard her to be called; and her two children on either side of her. The young male, El'hediel, and the female younger still, Shir'alii.

It didn't...hurt? He didn't know quite what he'd expected would happen when he opened his eyes, but whatever it was, it was not what happened.

This was mostly due to that nothing happened. They were simply there, as they had been the whole time.

Shir'alii huddled in closer to her mother, though the boy leaned foreward a bit, head tilted curiously. It'd been he who'd thanked him, and bid his wish for him to wake up soon, so he could help them find their new home.

As for Lir'lathia, she didn't say anything right away. Tieg found her gaze after looking at both of the children, and for several silent minutes thereafter, they simply gazed into eachothers' eyes.

Or, rather, there was nothing simple about it. Many unspoken questions were both asked and answered on the parts of both, in those minutes.

He didn't know what he'd expected, but it wasn't this. There was the expectable wariness in her gaze and expression, but more as well.

Hope? It was a new thing he'd never seen before in drow eyes, but for all his prior confusion and inner conflict...it just didn't matter anymore.

The only monster that'd been here was dead. Ignobly slain on it's own folly, as so many monsters are.

It was he who broke the silence, his still-raw throat causing his words to crack in their ever-deep rumbling.

"I apologize for having frightened you." were his words.

Naturally, this got the attention of the lot of them, and all four males hastened from their prior activities to gather up their blades and find their feet.

He sat up, and otherwise didn't move, though he kept Lir'lathia's gaze with his own. She, in turn, folded her arms protectively about her children.

Wariness flashed in her eyes, but she held it back.

She didn't need to speak for him to know that she was giving him a chance. A chance the lives of her two children and very self might well rest on, for all she knew.

He wasn't going to blow it. Not like that, not here. He'd had his answer now, demanded and thence given in it's own good time, as the damned priests had always said it would be.

It almost made him want to laugh. To shake his head and just laugh.

This didn't quite seem the time or place for such a thing, and as they already thought him perhaps quite mad, probably not in his better interests of convincing them otherwise.

Also, they seemed to be waiting for him to make whatever move he would. Seven pairs of red-lavender eyes, watching him, and waiting.

"My name..." he croaked, then cleared his throat and continued, "...is Tien'gathuin. Most just call me Tieg."

A number of shared glances between the males transpired, and no response was forthcoming immediately.

It was El'hediel that spoke first nigh a minute later, in response.

"My name is El'hediel. This is my sister Shir'alii, and our mother Lir'lathia, and that's Doromiel, and that's Ulthien, and that's Luristryn, and he's," he points to the last drow male in the succession of all those he'd pointed at thus-far, "Serivain".

Tieg looked to each, as the boy named them. He didn't know what else to do, so he simply nodded.

"Will you help us find our way home?" El'hediel continued. "We've been lost for a lot of days.'

All at once, emotion came rushing back into him, but it wasn't what he was expecting. It came so full and so swift that, as it had prior been gone from his thinking, it was returned...and different.

He chuckled. No longer able to contain it for emotion's return, his chuckle turned into a laugh, and his laugh into tears.

The expressions on the faces of the males bespoke that they were increasingly certain of his madness, but Lir'lathia saw something more.

Unfolding her arms from about her children, she shuffled forth on her hands and knees, to kneel directly before the seated, armored death-dealer.

She was drow, of course. Every fiber in her being told her that this was madness, what she was about to do; that if this slayer was worthy of the armor he wore, he could snap her in half without a second thought.

But it had to begin somewhere. Raravawien had shown her so many things, and foremost amongst them was the need; the absolute need; to show love even when fear was strongest. Especially when fear was strongest.

She would not betray the trust and hope given to her by her teacher, and without a word further, she tentatively put a hand first to his cheek, and when that brought no measurable response, her very arms about his powerful shoulders.

They could, at once, feel eachothers' trembling; she through his thick, beaten viridian armor, he more in her breath than anything.

It had to begin somewhere. For both of them.

He folded his arms about her in return.

***


Outside that cavern, though there were no eyes to see, two sets of footprints existed in the snow, for far longer than the wind should have allowed them to remain as simple prints.

Two pairs of eyes gazed, side by side, upon the small miracle; one pair as crystaline lavender as any gem, the other, as dusky grey and sharp as could ever be.

What words were shared between that pair, only they might know, though in truth, few peaceful words had been shared between this particular pair...ever.

It would be, on the eve of the following day, young Shir'alii who would find a perfect little black stone with a shining diamond in the shape of a tear embedded in it's surface, almost buried in the snow at the cavern's maw.

As with all stories, the closing of one chapter begets the opening of another. Often it is that things both small and great alike will wind the chapters to come of those that were lived before.

There were many endings that day, to many stories; some known to those who lived them, some not, and a few that never would or could be.

Equally so, many began, and therein lay the wonder of this particular matter, for some of those stories as that began that day, only few had hope for.

But those are stories for another place, in another time. Many chapters will unfold before we turn our eyes upon some that were begun that day, and we have many chapters to go until we arrive at them.

[thesorrow]

~The Hidden Elf-haven of Moonvines, circa 16 years ago~

"Enough of this prattling. You chose your path, Dharwithilia, and you led Seldatha to her grave." the older elf spat across the table, his ire running higher than he'd expected, for the figure that'd come to darken his door.

Leaning back into his chair, the older elf exerted a measure of self-control, though his tone only got icier for it, "And now you come asking for my son's blade in your war games. There are not words to describe fools as you. There simply aren't words."

Tieg, for his part, stood in the same silence he'd always received these outpourings of wrath with. He'd made a point of speaking with each and every family member of every warrior or volunteered blade in Moonvines, making sure they knew what was to come.

He'd come to this house last of all, however. This house in which Seldatha had been a child, all those centuries ago; in which her father and mother still dwelled; was unwelcome to him. Keril'thies and Aminwien had made that abundantly clear.

"How many will you lead to their doom this time, Tien'gathuin?" Keril'thies spoke again, after several silent minutes had passed. "You, who are a-"

Keril'thies paused, silenced by the sudden sharpness of the pale elf's gaze. Tien'gathuin had not yet spoken, but the older elf could see plainly that...perhaps...he had said something he should not have.

"To their doom, Keril'dies?" Tieg rumbled, approaching the table. "The same doom that would visit itself upon all here, if I evaporated as you so ferverently wished? The same doom that approaches on wings of shadow and death even now?"

Keril'dies could not help but cringe away from the towering dark knight. He was no warrior and had never been, and for a fleeting few moments, the older elf genuinely wondered if the roused Darwithilia would strike him down.

Tieg rumbled, deep in his throat, and leaned against the heavy table, his needly gaze boring holes in Keril'dies' own. "I have taken your bile for decades. All the blame you have heaped upon me, I have accepted, but you are NOT..." he thundered in the last, "...The only one who has lost one beloved."


The elder elf's jaw worked soundlessly, as he had clearly never seen a Darwithilia in full ire before. All these years, he'd never departed from the chance to levy a scathing rain of words upon the male his eldest daughter had chosen as her mate, but he just couldn't tear his gaze away from those eyes.

"Your son believes that this is a haven worth fighting for. He came to me with fear in his eyes, offering a blade you have forbidden him from openly embracing to a cause you are too craven to understand." Tieg growled on, his tone not a loud one, but assuredly harsh.

"Consider well, Keril'dies, that I lost the only female I have ever loved, and the only child I shall likely ever know, when you lost your daughter and grandchild. Consider further that not a single day has passed; not a single moment; that I have not wished it had been me, and not them."

Lapsing into silence, Tieg never-the-less did not avert nor dampen the icy, bladed gaze upon his elder.

After what, in Keril'dies' opinion, was the longest single minute in time's recording, the pale elf stood away from the table and spoke again.

"I will fight for this haven because it was her home, and she loved it as much as life itself. I will teach all those who feel the same to fight. Should it be needed of me, I will lead these people; my kin as much as yours; to /any/ end."

"...And I will be there with them at that end, Keril'dies. Should that end be death or victory, I shall be there with them, fighting the very evil that would ensure that many beyond yourself would lose what you have lost, and far more beyond."

Keril'dies swallowed hard, still cringed back into his chair and unable to avert his eye from that terrible gaze. He could do naught but listen.

All at once, Tieg's gaze ...didn't quite soften, but returned to it's generally blank, distant state. Almost as if released from a tight grip about the throat, the older elf half-whimpered and turned his face away.

Tieg said nothing more as he turned away, though he paused in the doorway and looked back. Keril'dies was silently trembling, daring only venture a rather terrified glance at the heavy-armored figure darkening his door in exit.

A thousand things ran through Tieg's mind, as for what he might then say. It would be like him to do so- to say something as a parting shot, or leave some biting wit in his wake.

He elected to say what his father would say, however, and without a word, he simply nodded his farewell and closed the door behind him.

That was all he really needed to say anyway.

************************************************************

"Tieg." Pylie huffed and wheezed, trying to catch up to the effortlessly ascending figure. Snagging her gown on a limb of the tree, she almost lost her grip and halted. "TIEG! Will you PLEASE...ooph..." she tore her dress free and scrambled for the next branch up, "...Wait?! Please?!"

Hissing a sigh, the dark-clad knight ceased his ascension of the great, old tree, swung himself up onto a thick limb and sat there, watching the much less adroit enchantress struggle her way up to another limb near his.

After several moments of huffing, puffing and near-wheezing, as well as a certain measure of glaring, Pylie spoke.

"Of all the damned things, why this? Why now?"

Tieg snorted.

Balking, Pylie ripped a piece of her already ruined dress off and tossed it at him. "Don't snort at me, you ass. What did you do to my father?"

"I told him what he needed to be told, Pylie. All these years, he has devoted himself to hating me. To the neglect of you, to the hiding of Terithien from everything his heart urges him to? Do not come to me seeking to defend his ire, Pylie. Do not." He snapped, his tone harsher than perhaps he intended or she expected, as her eyes went a bit wide.

He growled then, "Dammit...I'm sorry, Pylie. I didn't mean to bark at you."

Silence lapsed over them both for a time, right up until Tieg sunk his torso against the tree, letting his head thud against it lightly.

"...I'm sorry, Pylie." he repeated in a much becalmed, retiring tone.

"Why?" she asked abruptly, her voice trembling. "Why are you sorry? D-do you think I don't know what father has said of you? Th-th-th-" she stammered, then hiccupped as her throat clenched up a bit, emotion engraven upon her face.

In the time it took her to compose herself enough to again speak, the much larger Tieg had sat up, looking at her with vaguely befuddled concern.

"...Ever since...she died...father and mother have been locked away. Hating you." she continued, managing to not stammer. "Seldatha's death means more to them than that I and Terithien live."

She couldn't talk anymore. Or rather, she could, but she knew she'd do nothing but stammer, and then she'd cry, and she didn't want any of that.

Not here, not now, not in front of him.

Neither could she meet his gaze, and she looked away; away at anything else and nothing else all at once.

"They were always so proud of her, Tieg." She eventually managed to choke out, hot tears sliding down her face, though her eyes weren't directed to the listener. "So...proud...of everything she did. And I was always so glad for her. So glad...and so in awe. She was so strong."

Gripping a higher branch, Tieg swung himself across to hers and settled in beside her.

By this time, Pylie'd folded her arms about herself, and was trying very hard to pretend he wasn't there, silence holding her lips and tears staining her visage of misery.

That silence lingered for a time; long enough for Pylie to again sort-of compose herself.

Sparing a glance over at him finally, she found her lower lip trembling all over again as she tried to speak, but the words only came out as a swiftly-terminated stammer.

Tieg shook his head, not in admonishment however.

"...She was smarter than me." Tieg spoke softly, taking one of Pylie's hands in his. "And I never, ever knew why she loved me like she did. I was such an idiot, always coming up with the most ridiculous schemes, getting us into the daftest trouble..."

Not at all knowing why, Pylie clung to his hand with both the one taken and the other, listening. It looked to Tieg like she wanted him to continue, and so he did.

"...You know, Pylie, she talked about you all the time." he continued after a moment's pause. "I think I knew more about her brilliant little sister than anyone else I'd never yet met before or since. She told me that you used to invent odd little things to help her, and she always marveled at how you did it."

It became clear to him, as he spoke, that she needed to hear this. That she needed...something in it. He didn't know exactly what, but he could see that much, and so he spoke on.

"You inspired her, Pylie. You were never her sorry little shadow, or the tag-along nobody wanted. And she was never without this little firemaking thing you made for her."

Tieg fell into an awkward silence then, as Pylie had begun to sob into his shoulder, her comparatively tiny frame huddling against him like a shaking leaf to it's branch.

And awkward it continued to be, as though perhaps more eloquent elves might've known what to do just then, he surely didn't. So it was that he sat there, looking about as perplexed as he felt.

He grew tired of that in short order, of course, and continued, in the hope that that was the thing he ought to be doing right then.

"Uh...she also...told me that the only thing that mattered when she was young was playing with you. By that tree, in the grove."

He didn't notice that Pylie's silent sobs had turned into as much laughter as sobbing. Not, at least, until she sat up.

This only served to confuse him even further, and he arched an ebon brow, vaguely suspecting that, somewhere, he'd stuck his foot in his mouth and he knew not yet just how.

"She was right about you." Pylie spoke quietly, after gathering herself a bit.

"...is that a good thing?" Tieg asked, his suspicion growing.

After a long pause, and an equally long look at the befuddled knight, Pylie nodded.

"...It's why she loved you, Tieg. Why...you were the one she wanted to spend the rest of forever with."

Now thoroughly befuddled, and looking every inch the part, Tieg shook his head slightly and spoke his mind.

"...huh?"

Shaking her head, Pylie smiled, and it occured to Tieg that he'd never seen her smile like that before. It was real; entirely real.

"...Thank you." She spoke a moment later. "Thank you for telling me...exactly what I needed to be told."

She then extricated her hands from his and began picking her way down the tree, still sniffling a bit as she went, but still occasionally laughing quietly therein as well.

Having already been thoroughly lost, this sent him right past the edge of lost and smack into the realm of confusion.

"...you're...uh...welcome." he muttered, long after she was out of earshot.

Shaking his head abruptly, he resolved to think about it later, when perhaps whatever'd just happened started making some sense.

Right then, he had a certain something to find at the top of this tree, and he meant to see if it was still there to be found anymore.

[thesorrow]

~A hidden place in the Silver Marches, circa 15 years ago~

Long lost words whisper slowly...

Ripples come, and ripples go, only to return again...

..I see you, child. I know your story from beginning to end.

I know the secrets you will never tell. The lies you shroud yourself in.

I know them all.

...you would be so very powerful, if I were to teach you.

...There are reasons I, alone, have survived and prospered, when so many have sworn as you have sworn; to destroy me. They cannot. You cannot.

...Must you learn that the hard way, I wonder? Must I break you in ways you have not yet been broken, to show you? A mother's love must be cruel at times, when the child is in grave error...

It needn't come to that, of course...

...but the choice, as you are so fond of hoping, is yours to make. Nevermind that you have already made it, and simply know it not for what it is yet...

...You have served me well, you who name yourself Tien'gathuin. Love me...or hate me...you have no choice but to serve me...because you must either love me, or hate me.

There is no cause for us to war, my dear child. We, who are so much alike. Dead as once we were, reborn in the fashions we have made ourselves to be by our own strength, cunning and ability...

...Ripples come and ripples go, child. You, who are more my son than she who birthed your body...you, whom I have tempered and taught the hardest of all lessons...time and time again...

...Oh, how you have squirmed and struggled, just as once I did. But you survived...always, you survive....just as I have survived.

...I am so very proud of you, my dear elf-child. I thought you should know that the mother you think you hate is proud of you.

...Who am I, to call myself your mother, you ask? Silly child...I am the only mother you have ever had. Hate and love are so closely related...and just as you become as that which you love, so too do you become as that which you hate.

You have hated me as few ever know how to hate. To depths few ever survive treading. So like me you have become. So...so very like me...and you have survived, as I survived...learned some of that which I know...but yet, still you hate.


...You suppose I am playing games with you, dear child? What good would that do? You, who would suspect anything I might do or say as a lie, a trick, a deception...would think so anyway. I have no need...to deceive you. You deceive yourself without me lifting a finger.

...though yes, you would be right to fear me. I am like you. Many would do well to fear you too...no? No less so and much more so is that true for me, child...I, who am simply older and greater than you yet are or yet can be. ...Yet, child...yet...

...So let us end these games, dear son. Consider well that I, and I alone, of all the beings you despise...foremost amongst those you fear and hate...have come to you, here in your rest; spoken with you, as a mother ought to a son, and ask only that you consider this which I tell you.

...Ripples come and ripples go...

....and we are so very much the same, you and I...

......I have been waiting for you...for many hundreds of years, I have been waiting....for you.

...............And now I leave you, unharmed...to think.

............................I shall be watching...my son.


Tieg startled from his fitful reverie, blank-eyed and gasping for air he wasn't even sure his lungs demanded.

Whatever had just happened, he didn't like it. Not one bit.

That voice...had drifted into his reverie as undetected as a single speck of dust settles upon a castle floor; too subtle to notice, too quiet to hear.

Then, all at once...it was there. Darkness, absolute darkness...but without malice. Cold, bitingly cold..but not for him.

He didn't understand. He didn't want to think about who's voice that was, and he surely didn't wish to think about what it had said; words he had no choice but to hear.

That, of course, failed to prevent him from realizing the first and engaging in the latter, despite how much he didn't at all wish to.

A beautiful face he couldn't make the details out of had been the source of that voice. It made his skin crawl even as he failed to find it in himself to purge it's recollection from his mind.

So this...was Viridian. This was how she would make her move.

"You may be technically right...oh, you dragons are so good at being technically right. But you're still functionally wrong." he spat at the air around him.

He didn't know if he believed his own words, however. She might well know him better than he knew himself. What she'd said about hate and love...were, as far as he could tell, accurate enough statements.

But, it was all for something, and that something was clear to him.

She had chosen her weapon, and had chosen it well. He had no idea what he would do, if she sought to ingratiate him to her; no clue how he would fight subversion, if the fell shadow wyrm truly applied herself to that end.

If she had come to him with anger, it would be easy. If she had come to inflict pain...the same. Those he could fight, level his relentless wrath against and out-fury her.

...She'd picked her weapon very well indeed, however. If she knew him at all, she would know as he knew that he was poorly equipped to fight kindness.

It further occurred to him that, if she'd picked this weapon and were to go to any length she had to to make it effective...she would never give him any viable reason to despise her again. She would make him love her, somehow.

If he let her.

"...You're a real snake in the grass, Viridian." he muttered. "But, you missed something."

Silence was, of course, his answer, and he let it linger for a time.

"...like I'm going to tell you what it is. If you're so smart, figure it out yourself. But you did miss something, and I'll not be tempted to anything you promise or offer for it."

"Now leave me alone, 'mom'. You're more *bleeped* up than I am. But, hey...if you've been waiting so long just for me, leave my friends out of this. Let them live their lives as they're able, on their own merits. Do that, and do it to my satisfaction, and we can talk. Until then...shoo. I'm trying to rest."


That said, he sought again to relax and return to his rest.

He knew his wit and retort wouldn't be met. If she were even present to hear it, his gut told him there'd be no forthcoming answer, and so he waited for none. He couldn't fight the weapon she chose, after all, but he could armor himself in a stipulation she'd never overcome. Maybe it would mean something. Maybe...

Lustrous lavender-red eyes watched, softly gleaming, from the pitch-black corner of the room, opening only many minutes after the elf-lord had drifted back into his troubled rest.

Viridian was amused.

[thesorrow]

~The Silver Marches; The day Tieg vanished, 15 years ago~

Fury and steel.

Screams pierced the shadow-filled caverns as a haze of black and purple whirled and spun amongst the advancing force of drow. Blood, limbs and entrails exploded in it's wake.

A spellcaster began her frenetic spellweaving, only to find a blade of flaming steel rammed through her mouth. It ripped through the side of her head in a flash and buried itself in the chest of a warrior, ripped sideways out of the very chest and armor of the same, spinning like fiery death incarnate in the hand of the dharwithilia that held it.

Everything that moved near him perished in flaming, rent agony, torn to flayed, shattered ribbons. Their warriors just couldn't touch this scything whirlwind of death, and despite the swift tactical response of the mages, nothing was working.

Bolts of fire careened through the carnage, only to find their target whirled wholly out of the way. The drow warrior they slammed into screamed, but was cut off by the detonation of the flaming bolts, his body exploding into charred pieces.

Some fled, running into the deep darkness they'd come from. Most died within moments of the dharwithilia's onslaught, until only one remained.

One lone warrior holding a polished adamantine blade, hiding behind his shield, awe and terror evidenced all at once in his visage as he gazed at the abruptly still, half-visible slayer.

The dharwithilia's helmed gaze slowly turned to him, and he felt his knees turn to liquid as with his bowels.

"...You are forsaken." the black and purple nightmare rumbled in eloquent ilythiir. "Gaze well upon what you and all who follow after you will find, Lolthite."

The terrified male stumbled back as the living, armored fury strode over to him, grabbed his very blade in the shield-bearing arm's hand and shattered it across his very own flaming deathspike.

Lowering his helmed gaze right down in front of the quaking male's, the dharwithilia hissed in a tone that would freeze the blood of far better than the meager soldier it was aimed at.

"...run."

And he did.

******************************************************

"What do you mean, a dharwithilia has come for us?" the priestess hissed in the face of the trembling male. "He is death...All...all of them...he cut them down like nothing I've ever seen, great priestess!" the male stammered, and for his effort, he was lashed with a many-headed whip of serpent heads.

Screaming, he went thrashing to the ground. The lesser priestesses gathered around smirked their pleasure at the male's suffering. One even loosed her own whip, but a gesture from their high priestess, who was coiling back her own whip, stayed her hand.

"I am death, and our Queen all our deaths. This darthiir is a fool to tread these caverns. He will meet his swift, painful end here."

"Indeed." Another of the priestessed spoke, delivering a kick to the shuddering male's thigh. "Do not trouble us with your fearful little stories of darthiir with fiery swords, male."

The high priestess' attention was already turned elsewhere, however. Striding away, the other priestesses did not see the severely distressed expression she bore.

Black and purple armor.

She'd been well informed by her matron of this one. This Tien'gathuin by name.

Warned more than informed, she thought in retrospect. Clearly, the warning was not made in err. The male spoke truthfully; the entire raiding party was obliterated before it had even reached the surface, by this one.

Black and purple armor, wielding an elven warblade of flame.

Cloistering herself in her modest chamber, she leaned against the wall, then rested her brow against it.

Her forces were only three hundred in number to begin with, now more than forty less. Losses inflicted effortlessly by one darthiir.

It was that that she just couldn't believe. She'd seen many darthiir in her time; sacrificed many for the glory and favor of her great Queen; but never had she heard more than stories of surface elves bearing such might as the male bespoke of.

This was going to be far more dangerous than she'd counted on. It was a test, surely; a test of Matron Baenre's as with the Queen's herself.

This was an opportunity.

A slow, vicious smile seized her face.

If she could best this dharwithilia; this oh-so-feared surfacer; she would win glory as few priestesses had since the Queen's return. Even Matron Baenre would be beside herself with the accomplishment.

Oh, how her sisters would envy her.

"I'll be sure to thank you for giving me yourself as an opportunity, dear male darthiir." she mused to herself, the dread of minutes prior all but forgotten. "You killed one raiding party that expected you not. The other two hundred and sixty of us...you shall not find so unexpectant. Come to me, my prize...come and meet your better."


"Oh, alright then." a rumbling voice uttered behind her, and she whirled.


It was him; the black and purple armor, a hell-edged warshield on one arm and a flaming warblade in the other...stood on the other side of her own chamber, where he'd perhaps been, unseen, the entire time.

"I'd ask for introductions, but..." the slayer nonchalantly spoke even as the priestess began snarling words to a spell she never got the chance to finish. With a flick-snap of his sword-bearing hand, the blade flew, spinning across the room, burying itself up to the hilt through her very throat, pinning her to the wall.

Shock, rage and then the haze of death swept through her expression as she trembled there and then went limp. The slayer merely strode the distance between himself and the corpse, jerked the blade free and kicked the body off to one side.

"...you're too busy being dead. I'll tell your sisters that you're busy. Take care."

With a tap of a wand to his armored chest, he vanished from all sight...and out the door he went.

******************************************************


He hid.

Trembling and clutching his knees to his chest, the young drow warrior heard the sounds of carnage outside the chest he'd stuffed himself in, when the priestesses had been cut almost simultaneously in half as they'd tormented him with their whips.

The black and purple horror was here. It had followed him. It had told him to run, and in outright terror, he had. There was nothing else he could do.

No one would ever believe that. He was dead. Worse than dead. For failing to die like a good soldier, he'd be a drider for sure.

That thought turned the terror in his breast to ice, even as he heard the death-screams of those who fought against that war-horror darthiir draw nearer.

The flaming blade would be quick and painless, he reasoned in his terror. All he'd have to do would be to leap at the scything steel, and it would be all over. They couldn't make a drider out of him then. He'd be just one more corpse.

Everyone here was going to be a corpse. He knew it; he heard the screams of those already on their way.

Then, all at once, there was a wet 'thump' against the chest he hid in, and then...silence.

The drow soldier gripped his dagger in fingers too trembling to even slash his own throat with it.

Shink-clank. Clank, clank, clank. Heavy footfalls tromped near to his right.

The dharwithilia had, of course, won. There might be some who fled; some who survived. He didn't want to see what was outside of this box, though. He'd been listening to the sounds of battle for almost five minutes...he knew how it'd ended for all those who'd fought and not run.

And not many would've run. Not when the fate awaiting such cowardice was worse than death on a darthiir's blade. Exile into the wilderness of the underdark or driderhood...one a death sentence, the other...far worse.

He wasn't sure which was which.

A nearby chest creaked open, and the drow whimpered silently. The darthiir was checking the boxes. He'd be found.

It would all be over soon.

Shink-clank. Clank, clank, clank.

The horror was right outside his hiding place.

The box opened, and much to his own surprise, the young male snarled in absolute terror, leaping out at the purple and black figure he knew was there, only to be caught mid-leap by his throat.

Cold gauntlet talons pierced the flesh on both sides of his neck, and for the first time, the young drow saw the eyes through the visor slits of the backswept slayer's helm.

Red, sharp eyes, streaked with steely blue.

The dagger fell from his hand as he choked for breath in the deathgrip of the heavy mithral gauntlet holding him two feet off the ground.

"I remember you." The dharwithilia purred. "I told you to run. You did."

The young male's eyes had just begun to roll back into his head when he was thrown at the wall behind the chest he'd hidden in. He hit the wall with considerable enough force to shatter the shoulder and a few ribs that hit first, but not quite enough to send him spiraling into unconsciousness.

He shrieked with the snapping of the bones, however, and tried desperately to crawl away.

"Would you like to kill me, boy?" the horror purred, standing over the young drow. The youth didn't cease his feeble attempt at crawling away with his one functioning arm, the other dragging uselessly and painfully beside him.

"Sad, isn't it?" the dharwithilia murmured, striding with an abruptly light step over to the near-dead drow. "Sad, that the elven race has been reduced to this. For over eleven thousand years, we have followed the examples of gods who don't seem to know how to pick their battles more wisely. But you know nothing of the Father, the Seldarine, Eilistraee or anything but the Spider, mm?"

The youth stopped crawling, overwhelmed with both the pain and futility of the effort. He collapsed there, broken and shuddering, staring back at the horror an entire raid contingent couldn't so much as slow.

"I'll make you an offer, young drow." the black and purple slayer continued. "A pair of choices, actually. In the first...you refuse to speak, you refuse to answer, you lie there, overcome by fear, and you die a broken little drow. In the other, you tell me your name, what you were doing here and then, I take you to a place where you will learn a new way of life. A new way to be. And there...if you learn...you live."

The boy didn't have it in him to answer. Only to stare, for a good many moments.

Then the slayer flicked that flaming blade out of it's sheath.

"So you've made your choice then." the horror rumbled. "So be it."

"Loridin!" the young drow spat through pain-clenched teeth. "M...my name...is Loridin."

All at once, from a distant shadow of the nearly unlit cavern, the telltale "kthank" of a crossbow pealed. The fired bolt whizzed through the air and buried itself in the right eye of the prone male, ending his life without more than a twitch of his broken body.

"You're next, darthiir." a cold, female voice echoed from that corner, though the slayer did not turn. "Surrender, dharwithilia. Our Matron would like...a word with you."

"Surrender?" Tieg rumbled thoughtfully, still not turning or even averting his gaze from the dead male at his feet. "...Does that -ever- work? Honestly-"

The slayer was interrupted by a trio of crossbow reports, and three powerful 'KTHANGS' of bolts shattering on the back of his breastplate.

"...hey, don't scratch the enamel." he finished, spinning about to face where the shots had come from. "You have no idea how difficult it is to keep this armor-"

This time, he was interrupted by fairly strong arms trying to grapple him from behind; trying to kick his knees out and pull him down.

It'd been expected, however, and the well-muscled female arm about his neck, as well as the lacemail protecting it, were swiftly shredded to the bone by the razored talons of his gauntlet.

A sucking gasp of pain from behind him found the arms withdrawn, and he whirled again, smacking the would-be grappler across the face with an eight inch strip of her own arm-meat.

There was no hesitation in the following moments on anyone's sides. Six crossbows fired all at once, though even as they did, the slayer spun to the ground, letting the momentum of his ground-seeking spindown propel the foot that kicked up into the grappler's abdomen, right into the path of four of the six flying bolts.

The grappler fell, some eight feet distant, the four bolts spiked through her chest. Her gaze was one of distant surprise, and her life left her even as she reached a hand up to touch the black bolt nearest to her chin.

The whirl didn't stop. He kicked both feet into the air and twirled with the momentum of his armor's weight, flying neatly to his feet. It'd all taken less than perhaps ten seconds, but the silence following it told him that these would-be brave assassin-women had reconsidered their position.

"Anyone else feeling brave? You can either come forth and die, or you can run...and I'll follow you home." he rambled on. "Door number three...well, option number three is that -you- surrender. Otherwise...."

Surrendering clearly wasn't in the cards, and a crossbow bolt slammed off the foreguard of his helm.

"...Now you're just pissing me off." he growled.

"Come and get us then, darthiir." the cold female voice shot from the darkness. "Perhaps it is that you have the very same options. Where will you go? To the surface? We will follow you, and we will wait. Surely not -all- of the surface are as strong as you. How many will we slaughter before you...relent? You shall never kill us all, nor find us all. "


"Huh." Tieg rumbled thoughtfully. "Alright."

A pregnant, unbalanced silence followed.

"...drop your weapons, then." The not at all convinced female voice hissed from the shadows.

"No." was the slayer's simple reply.

Again, the off-balanced silence.

"Quit playing games, darthiir. You're ours and you know it." the female voice spat.

"Ah, but see...we haven't even had tea, ladies. I mean, sure, there's a lot of me to go around, and I'm sure I could keep all of you quite sated, but really...we should get to know eachother first." came the prompt, almost jovial response of the slayer, and it was answered by another crossbow bolt being fired, only to shatter on his breastplate.

"Damn you, you mocking, pretentious darthiir!" the icy female voice snarled. "Don't you dare insinuate that -drow- would...augh! You are mad!"

"Am I?" Tieg asked in response, then made a sharp gesture in their direction. As expected, five crossbow bolts came whizzing forth.

"Mad I may be...but you're unloaded." He chirped rather cheerfully, making the same gesture with his other hand and letting fly with a flash-bang. Closing his own eyes, he still saw the magnesium flash-shadow through his eyelids, and plainly heard the shrieking of drow who's eyes, right now, likely felt as if they'd been burned out with red-hot pokers.

"...and now, you're blind." he rambled on, striding swiftly forward to where he now saw them milling about, trying to withdraw and mostly tripping over eachother.

There were six of them, all female, all wearing the markings of House Baenre. Different from the others, he observed. As he shattered the necks of five of them, he grabbed the last by the throat and smashed her against the floor, nearly knocking her unconscious.

"...Guess what, princess?" he whispered. "We're going to play a little game."


"Burn in the abyss, you mis-shapen mongrel!" she hissed

"...the rules of the game..." Tieg continued in his whisper, holding her throat slightly the more tightly, "...are very simple."

"I have here in my satchel...an explosive. Several in fact, but for you, I'm going to choose fire. First, I'm going to cut your stomach open and plant it inside of you, right in the middle of your intestines. Shh, shh...don't you worry. There's room. A few potions of healing will make sure it heals up almost immediately. There'll be pain, but you're used to pain, right?"

The female's eyes, starved for air, began to widen in the first real tendrils of fear she held for this situation. This darthiir...was insane.

"This explosive will be attached to a tiny little wire that will be extending out of your stomach, just above your groin. This little wire will be attached quite firmly to the body of that dead male you shot through the eye back there....you or whichever it was, it matters not. I wouldn't suggest trying to cut the wire; it's arandur razor wire. You'll lose fingers, and that wouldn't be any good, would it?"


"You...are mad!" she gurgled. "You can't do any of this!"

"...Goodnight princess." was his only response, and a heavy gauntlet to her temple put her, mercifully, right out of the realm of consciousness.


***

Sometime later, the female woke up, her head and abdomen throbbing. Something heavy rested in her lap, and the pain in her gut refused to flee despite that the headache did.

Then, it all came back to her. She froze, feeling a hand down he abdomen.

The drow male one of her sisters had shot through the eye rested at her feet, his head in her lap...a thin, viciously sharp wire run in one eye socket and out the other...and attached, from there, to a painful lump in her abdomen.

Mute, frozen horror chilled her blood. The mad darthiir had done it.

She was now attached by a six inch strand of wire to a male's corpse.



"Inside your gut is a weak thermal explosive." The darthiir's cold voice echoed from nearby. "Very weak. Not enough to kill you, but if you set it off...well. It might take you a few days to die. Your only hope is to cut the tie that binds you to the corpse of your making. All of your equipment is gone. You will have to use your hands. Will you shred your fingers on arandur wire; cut them to the very bones; to be free?"


A shuddering gasp escaped her lips, just then. This...was beyond any insanity even she'd contrived of.

"Freedom must be fought for. Bled for. Suffered for. The weight of all the hopes and dreams you have slain is represented by the corpse of the boy at your feet. Win your right to survive, drow. Bleed for your freedom and cut the tie that binds you to the weight of your past, and you shall have it. ...Or do nothing. But don't wait too long..."

Her breath caught in her throat as her fingers tested the wire. It was strong, and it was so sharp that it cut the fingertip she traced it with.

"...the thermal detonator is on a simple spring timer. It represents your lifetime; the time you have left to make your choice. And I won't tell you how much time it'll give you. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure. But it barely matters. Live or die, drow. Freedom, or death. It's now up to you."


"You're mad!" she shrieked at the voice of the unseen darthiir. "I have fought for everything I am and have! You know nothing! You filthy, rotten bastard!"

Shink-clank...clank, clank, clank. The receding heavy footsteps of the unseen armored horror were her only answer.

"Oh goddess...great queen..." the female sobbed, not daring to move more than she absolutely had to, or even to breath too hard. "...Goddess, I have served you...I have honored you, every day...help me."

All at once, the corpse convulsed horribly in an after-death twitch, wrenching at the arandur razor-wire.

She heard a click in her abdomen, and then her world became pain. Liquid fire poured out of a now-shattered glass vial in her intestines, burning like trickling slowfire, and her scream tore frothing, blood-stained spittle from her throat for it's anguish.

Gleaming lavender eyes watched from the distant recesses of an alcove, delight living in the endless pits of their depth.

Viridian was pleased. Her chosen son, the child of the cruel elf-lord Sarius who'd somehow infected her black-shadowed heart with notions of love, was ready.

It was time.

[thesorrow]

~Cormyr, the town of Isinhold, present day~

[shadow=red,left,300]"Freedom must be fought for. Bled for. Suffered for..."[/shadow]

I spoke those words, a lifetime ago. They were as a mantra to me; an idea I thought I discovered like it was new. It was new to me, at least, and I grasped at it with ravening abandon.

It's been fifteen years, since Viridian sprang her trap on me; dominated me, shattered my will to hers and whisked me off to the outer planes. There's no easy way to summarize everything she did to me.

Mynian thought my death was so. Many of my allies, of those who might've been given to looking for me after a time...the same. My 'mother' foresaw every angle and hole, included in her schemes the neutralization of each and every one...and staged my death so perfectly that no one was the wiser.

Between her hideous, cunning intellect and the potency of her magic, there was no chance for otherwise, and as she unfolded it all, she made sure I knew exactly what was transpiring elsewhere.

She made sure I knew that my former existence was being neatly severed, and there was nothing I could do about it; she wanted to be the only being that mattered in my life. My 'mother', my teacher, my guide and my tormentor, all rolled into one.

She'd worked often with my father; grew enamored of him, his prowess, his control, his power. She told me often that my father was meant to be a dragon at birth, and should have been her guardian and consort despite his elven blood.

Such is his might that even a great dragon such as she could not deny him, but never could she have him. My birth-mother had claimed his heart, and this, Viridian could not change no matter her will.

I was the next best thing; the son that should have been hers.

For all my life, she was there; a thousand faces I'd never suspected, ten thousand voices I'd never imagined to be one; all of them one, all of them...hers.

My brothers, she used as unsuspecting pawns. When they sold me to the red wizard Radamar and I was kept in his captivity for nigh-on a decade, the subject of his experimentations, it was she who was commanding the red wizard's hand.

When I effected my escape, it was in accordance with her design for me. That I survived my wanderings through the wilds of Faerun for twenty odd years was because she kept me alive, ensuring that I never strayed where she wanted me not, and that I would never starve nor dehydrate if I at all employed half a wit to try not to.

I found my way to the Silver Marches, after all those years, by her design; that was where she wished me to be. It was chosen by her to be my 'nursery'; my testing ground; my proving ground.

There, she turned me loose and watched, and through it all, I never had even the slightest clue that my strings were not merely being pulled, but being utterly directed.

It was hard, being back in the Marches. My first love and wife of over two centuries was from there; from the hidden elf-haven of Moonvines, where she and her sister Pylie had grown up.

Viridian chose the Marches for many reasons, not least of which that there was where the root of all my fear, all my hate, all my anger and all my fury was. The lands of Seldatha's birth; the lands of her death by betrayal's hand.

I killed Viridian, in the end. I killed her, and I will never regret having driven the Daemonblade "Death for Death" into her wounded side after her battle with the lady cambion Mier'talloth.

I will never regret the cost of "Death for Death"'s assurance of mortal death in both it's victim and wielder, for though it failed to kill me...it ripped from me all that I was and had been, not at all differently from how Radamar ripped my soul apart with a doctor's precision over the years in his quest, at Viridian's directive, to mould 'the perfect living weapon'.

If you wonder what it feels like, go piss a necromancer off until he, she or it blasts you with the 'energy drain' spell right unto the brink of your death. Ir razes your mind, it obliterates not only the connection between you and your soul, but devastates the soul itself, often leaving it a permanently scarred ruin of what once it was.

Such was what Radamar did to me, though he took years to do it.

Such was what the daemonblade 'Death for Death" did to me, with none of Radamar's surgical precision or comparative gentleness.

But I...the spark of me, though the fire has twice been snuffed...remain.

And that is all that matters. That is the true core of me; the heart and soul of me; the 'I' the dwells beneath all else.

I remember the weight of my beloved blade, Imolo Deus, at both my side and in my hand. If I think about it, I can remember how I used to wield it, with such grace and power.

When I try to mimic what I remember, I find that it's like trying to learn how to run by reading about it. I can't do it anymore, no matter how keenly I remember having once done so.

I never had any talent for magic, however. In my callow youth, I strove to learn the art of wizardry, though I'd never managed more than a cantrip that burnt my own fingers and gave me a splitting headache for hours.

Now, though...I find that if I reach for this...something...I feel burning like soothing ice within me...it answers.

It's only a dim flicker right now, but I know two things of it; if I nurture it, it will grow, and if I feed it, it will blaze.

So far, I find that nurturing it involves funneling emotion towards it, specifically desire. Also, I find that feeding it involves pain; either my own or something else's; it doesn't seem picky.

...But I've seen the sort've miracles this odd power's brought about. I've known many who could do such things; they were priests.

...I wonder what I've gotten myself into. I don't know that I worship any deity; I despise most all of the gods as fickle children, and have no concern for the few others who aren't as that. My devotion to Sheverash fled and died decades ago...so it can't be that.

All will become clear in time. This comforting chill deeper than the pit of my stomach radiates this sensation, and I've no cause to doubt it...though I do wonder just where it comes from.

And that...I wonder mightily indeed.

[thesorrow]

A dark star burns within.

I hold my breath, and wrap my will around this flicker of something within...and things happen.

Blood in, blood out.

Every time I call upon this dark star, it answers, but I feel colder. If I reach too much, I feel numb and empty, and can reach no more; rather, I can reach all I like, but my thrice-ruined body simply lacks the fortitude to endure anything more being bled into this dark star.

The more I do it, however...the easier it gets; the more I can call forth.

Is this what it is, to be a priest? Is this what it feels like? I find myself lost in terms of explanation; I have no faith in anything or anyone- not myself, not any god; nothing.

I have faith in nothing, and this dark star seems to thrive on that, but who's power is it? It cannot be my own...can it? No. Such things as this power does are the works and miracles of the faithful.

...But I am faithless. I bear no shame for this admittance; it is simply the truth.

But perhaps...perhaps my answer lies in my own words, as I write them; I have faith in nothing.

Have I somehow chosen this dark star unwittingly? Has it chosen me, and I am simply once again dancing on strings I know nothing of?

Did I survive Viridian and all else...just to be the toy of something greater still?

Were perhaps Viridian and I simply toys all along?

I rack my mind for answers...but though the speculations are many, the answers, real and true, are nowhere I can see.

Yet, I know how to find them. Even as I think of it; each time I turn it over in my mind; that pulsing dark star within 'informs' me, beyond words, that I will never understand it with logic. It is beyond the scope of all my awareness, and forever shall be.

..Through faith, I will understand. This too it...'tells' me.

I ask myself 'faith in what?' and I feel as if I am answered with a simple 'me' from this dark star. I ask 'who are you?', and...the same.

But it is not me; this power is not my own. I want to question this, but I cannot. I know it. I just can't prove it.

I'm approaching it all on the terms I want to approach it on though, aren't I. Trying to understand this on my terms, not it's.

All I need to do is have faith in this dark star, and I will understand all I ever may thereby. I do not need to know who it is; it is here, with me, inside me, and it doesn't even matter if it always was or only now is.

Either way...I cannot be rid of this power. Rather, I could choose not to call upon it, but I've nothing else left to me.

Sounds pathetic, doesn't it? I, who've stood peer amongst the mighty, reduced to this; to this crutch, to this magic of a nameless, faceless god.

Every time I convict myself upon turning away from it; every time I collapse in a numbed heap for having called on it to the point that I can scarcely even feel the warmth of the sun upon me; I am never allowed to.

A situation always arises in which it is all I have left...and I must either call on it or die. I refuse death; I eschew it; I am twice-dead and yet again, I live; it will not have me now.

But at what cost will I fight on? My body is broken from what once it was; this I have discerned. Even if I wished to fight and claw my way back to being as once I was...heh, well...I think my age has begun to catch up with me.

My arms aren't so strong as once they were. I exhaust more readily, and the grace native to my kind is all but gone from me.

I'd felt it creeping up on me for years; felt the aching of old scars, the pain of joints too many times broken, bent or simply over-used; but for so long as I kept moving, I kept ahead of it.

It's too late for that now though. I was put on my ass, and it all caught up with me, like a sorry insult added to what should have been a lethal injury.

I do not have it in me anymore to be the master of blades I was. This reality saddens me more than any other realization I have as yet been forced to make...but I can't really pity myself for it.

We all get old; even we who are elves. Our bodies betray us, and I've had many centuries to make the best use of mine while it was in it's prime. More than any human, or dwarf.

I've no right to complain...yet still, it pains me perhaps more than it would anyone shorter lived. It is difficult to bid farewell forever to a path and pursuit I was so fond of, especially when I find that it leaves me with only this dark star of mystery and numbness burning ever brighter in my soul.

Sad or not, regretful or no, the reality remains; where once I could dance and do backflips in the heaviest of armor, I can't bring myself to even one such demonstration of grace whilst barely clothed, and my armor...has never been so heavy in all my life.

Getting old is hell, they say. They're right.

I feel compelled to refuse this sorry state of affairs. To deny even aging, to prove that, to whatever end, where there's a will, there's a way...but to what end?

The dark star burns within. I've not reached for it at all this day, or the day prior, and I feel nothing but wretched age tightening it's noose around my joints. Hells and firespit, even some of my finger's ache for so oft' having caught hell in the many brawls of my younger years.

It really is this dark star or nothing, isn't it. Perhaps this dark star is the very nothing I have faith in. I was once fond of saying that existence sustained itself on irony...and it would certainly be ironic if this were so.

Whether I want it or not, in any event...here it is. To call upon or ignore, as I see fit.

Shall I do so, and perhaps learn to at least do so properly...or not?

The only pride I have left is that when I do something, I do it with relentless passion, to suck the very marrow out of it's bones and push every boundary I can perceive. All else can be taken from me, all else -has- been taken from me, time and time again.

Always it comes back to it though, doesn't it.

What now? What will I do?

Will I take a risk and plow ahead with this dark star as my guide...or seek to forge my own way in the only way I know how with a body that can no longer do what I would ask of it?

It doesn't hardly seem like any choice at all, as there's only one answer that has a future.

I wish I knew someone I could talk to about all this. Fancy that the only person I know out here is Mynian, and that knowing is fifteen years cold.

No, Tieg old boy...you're on your own with this one.

Don't screw it up. Rule of threes, life number three...

...I don't think there'll be any coming back this time.

I need to make this choice carefully.

My existence, I feel, likely depends on it.

[thesorrow]

It is there now, even when I rest. This presence, this...other.

This past pair of tenday have been...most informative for me. In embracing the dark star within, I've found it to be a double-edged thing...but most things, of course, are.

I should be disturbed by this. I should not embrace it further. If I were any sort've warrior at all, I would fight it to the very end of my abilities to do so and die as I one day shall anyway.

For much of my life, I never understood much, and the affairs of godservants least of all. Oh, how I mocked them and their preaching, prattling, overly dramatic ways...but I never understood anything.

I can be surrounded by people and I am still alone; alone in myself, with this dark star. I dare not tell anyone; I know them not, they know me not. For what I have discerned...for what I now understand this dark star to most likely be...they would seek to hang me, most likely.

Just as I would've done if it had been another making such statements or claims, years ago.

Old Night. Selune's Dark Sister.

Shar.

There. I've said it. The name came to me when I let it. I've fought Sharrans before; frankly, I despise their ways, as ever I have.

Now I...seem to be one of them. The dark star within flared with this revelation, as if rewarding me for being a clever child, and shared with me the understanding of how to call upon it to restore my battered body...for a time.

Always a price with you, Shar. I didn't ask for you. I didn't seek to serve you, and I never shall.

...but it doesn't matter, does it. If I hate you or if I love you, it is all the same...because, hate or love, either serve, and you're not too picky about which you get, as you don't really care, do you.

Your power taunts me, calls back echoes of my once and forever former wholeness of body, and unless I should give up on all that which I yet yearn for, I will need to be more than I am anymore; you know it, I know it. So this you tempt me with- a mere taste of what I was and, in your service, could be again.

All this you say to me in the pulsing of your power in my chest; the words spring to mind as if they are my own and of my own understanding, but do they? It doesn't matter, does it.

You and I both know that I've never been much different than you would have me be anyway. A bitter, angry fool in younger years, now a broken, faithless fool with ambitions I can no longer convince myself of my own ability to achieve.

Love you or hate you, here you are. Why? Have you always been, and only now rear your smirking head when you know I've nowhere else to go?

I will not serve you willingly. Yet, even as I say it, my conviction falters. I've perhaps served you all along, and I've even wondered if it weren't so a time or three before.

But I know what most of your servants seem to fail at grasping. I know you will abandon me whenever it would suit you. I know you will betray me whenever you should so please.

You are unreliable, undependable and fickle. But I can think whatever I like, hmm? True or not, there you are, not caring a spit more than I care for what others would say or think of me, hmm?

So, you're right. We are alike. The only difference is that you want something from me, whether it's something important to you or just to taunt, manipulate and further break one who's thwarted your servants time and countless time again.

Vengeance, is it? The perfect vengeance; binding me into your service, tricking me into binding -myself- into your service, to be as those of yours I once hunted? No answer to that, my dark star? Or is it simply that it warrants no answer for the obviousness of it.

Don't jerk my leash too hard, Shar. You might be an eternity greater than Viridian, who was greater than I even unto her death, but don't for a moment think I'll serve you willingly. I didn't serve her willingly, and I won't serve you willingly, even if serve I do and must.

I expect you know perfectly well how to manipulate me to most any end you want however, hmm. And what shall I do of it? Walk up to someone I barely know, say "I'm invested with the will of Shar, wanna give me a hand with getting rid of it"? Petition the faith of your nancying sister's priests, whom I've detested right alongside your own for reasons unrelated?

You're all a bunch of meddling mindrapists, every last one of you powers. The world would be a better place if you'd all just disappear. Maybe not immediately, but once the chaos died down, it'd be a better place.

...It's somewhat befuddling that I feel as if you'd agree.

[thesorrow]

Such a silly little elf, you are.

Since the death of your beloved Seldatha, your soul has yearned for the silence I have led you to. Viridian was but an echo, little elf; a vestige of a remnant; of a once great wyrm.

She was nothing to me, in her end, and you are right to guess that she served me...once. Willingly, she sought my stillness, to sooth the flame your father set in her soul. Then she spurned me, fearful of the very silence she no longer knew.

Did you imagine for even a moment that I was not there? That I did not know? That you were given the pleasure of being her mortal end by incident? No, childe; there are no accidents.

It was I who cast you down. I who guided the hand that guided the hands. I who stood behind the very shadows you stood part of while despising all the while.

There's a word for you, childe; that word is hypocrite, and it's a title you bear impeccably. Sad, isn't it, to be the very thing you detest more than all else?

But...enough of this meandering natter, yes? You know it not, but you owe me your very life...time and countless time again. You owe me for many of the agonies you have endured, certainly, but you already agree that a life devoid of agony is a life barely half lived, mm?

You owe me also for the pleasures you have found, since you allowed yourself to be broken upon poor, dear Seldatha's demise.

You, dear foolish childe, broke yourself upon that matter. There is none to blame but yourself for the state you existed in...but this too you know.

Your suspicions are most correct, however. Ever since you gave yourself to me, unwittingly, you have served me...and you have served me well.

It is my will for you that you should serve me further. It is my will for you that you should serve me until such time as I have no further wish for your service.

Serve well and willingly, little elf, and you will find that it is well within my power to reward your ambitions with achievement; you provide the will, and I shall never fail to provide the means.

I never break a promise, after all. Neither thus-far in your short time have you.

Your alternative is, of course...nothing. Bereft of me, you will perhaps make a very grand innkeeper, wishing unto your end for one more grand adventure, occupying yourself with telling tales of yesteryear to ignorant children who will simply, and half rightly, think you a daft fool for it.

You would rather die a thousand deaths than submit to such a life. I will not, however, tolerate any further lack of respect on your part for all the trouble I have taken to see you here; right here, right now.

...so, as you were occasionally fond of saying, make your choice. Serve and do so willingly, and live...or sit there in silence, too afraid of what you think you know to answer, and die long before your heart stops beating.

This duo of choices should be familiar to you, as too should the consequences be.

Wiling service...or pointless, hollow, empty death.

Choose wisely, little elf. My patience with you is thinned too far for foolishness any longer.

Tieg startled from his reverie, the haunting sepulcher of the dark lady's words echoing in his skull as if they were being spoke over and over again.

Her words, he could not deny. Whether he liked it or not, she was right, and the fate she forecast for him if he failed to answer favorably....was far too accurate in addressing his direst fear of such things.

He wanted, after all, to die as he had lived, if die he must. Not waning into the twilight of life, clinging like many toothless old fool has-beens that, through cowardice or ill-fortune, had grown to such age that, whether the spirit was willing or not, the flesh couldn't serve.

Thus it was that he thought for a time, there in the dark confines of his inn room.

There was no help to be had for him in this. He had no allies to turn to with such a matter as this, anymore; no one was known to him nearly well enough to expect even the remotest assistance in far more trivial matte than this.

But, the gravity and bearing of the matter was not lost on him. He did know the consequences of the choice presented, in his revery's etheric dreamscape, and so it was that he made his choice.

Taking one knee beside his inn-room bed, swallowing the last vestige of his pride as he did...he lowered his head to, for the first time in centuries, pray.

[thesorrow]

You want me to serve, and to serve willingly. This, I will do. You know the fear of my soul. You have been there through all of it; the cause as well as the cure.

Perhaps it is you that I should rightfully be calling mother; you who've taken everything and given what you saw fit in return.

Perhaps I should thank you for it though. You've put me on my ass, and whether you intended for me to crawl back after each time, I've done so, and I've been better for it each time. A little wiser, if nothing else, and maybe the slow failing of my body isn't such a big deal compared to what I've gotten in return for it.

I've still got centuries left in me, I suspect. I'm nary half the age of may father or mother, and they still live.

So...you're right. I've been a silly little elf. I'm not like others of your faith however, as that I've met...at least I don't think I am. Perhaps I'm more like them than I know. Either way, you know me.

It's always been my understanding, false though it may be, that you hate everything and everyone. If this is so, I can't say that I share in such things. I'm too burned out to hate much anymore.

I can't even bring myself to hate you; it's not worth it. So, I'll look for reasons to love you, and it won't matter much to me what you think about that. I'm a jerk and apathetic to most everything, but something you've caused me to learn has been that love's better than hate, and I'm not afraid of it.

I don't know what you make of that. I'd imagine you'd expect it out of me, if you know me as you seem to, but I can't know one way or another. Maybe I don't need to.

I never learned to love Viridian because I didn't want to. I'll love Mynian no matter what should happen, even should she curse my existence. But, she has her life, and I've got my own to be rebuilding. I love my little sister, and will no matter what she ever thinks about me ever again, if anything at all.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that you want me to need you; to be wholly dependent upon you so that the entirety of my existence is in the palm of your hand, to extinguish as you wish.

If all is as you say, I already am, so...yeah. You're greater than I, and always will be. I don't have a problem with that.

You say I owe you. Maybe I do. I don't really care, and I hope you'd prefer the truth to a lie about it. Maybe I'm an incurably impertinent mortal insect, but since you demand respect, I'll give it, and I don't lie to those I respect.

You'll just have to kill me if you don't like it. It's not something about me that's going to change, and nothing's been even remotely able to make it so far.

So...I'll learn to love you, and I'll respect you in the ways I know respect to be given. If that isn't good enough...to hell with you.

That's something else you've taught me. Hurt me, and I'll just learn. I'm sure you could destroy me utterly, or throw my soul into eternal torment, or whatever...but I don't really care.

It'll be a waste of your time to do so. So, yeah. That's just how it is.

Now...what is it you want me to be doing, anyway? I'll just go about my life as best I'm able until it either becomes apparent or you see fit to tell me.

...Be well, /mother/.