Alas for my son Eliah Darkwood, illbegotten and loved nonetheless. Today I received a messenger who brought the tale of how he had killed his own father.
I feel a deep shame – if it was within my power, I’d turn the wheel of time back and change my course of action. But what use is there in regrets? The young always seem to pay for the ill chosen deeds of the elders. And the elders chose ill because at the time of choosing they where young and inexperienced…Thirty-one years ago, I was young myself, young and proud and foolish. I grew tired of the savety of our forest refuge and joined some of my friends to go back to the home we had been driven from. hoping to find my mother and maybe rescue her.
I sought to free my mother and was caught myself. Caught by human mercenaries who, upon discovering my maidenhood, decided not to rape and kill me like my friends, but to sell me as a slave.…but I was rescued, saved by the man whom I then thought to hate and now learned to love.
He was human, a wild man with wiry hair on his head and in his face – even all over his body did he have it…like a bear. Crude and brutal was he – arrogant and ungrateful was I. So it wasn’t surprising that we came to fight. First only verbal – then, since he had no chance against my sharp tongue physical.
And in the end, to claim his victory like men do, he took me, by force but still in a gentle manner. I couldn’t handle the effect he had on me, didn’t want to acknowledge my heart – and so all I knew was blame, victimizing myself, walling off my heart – until now, that our son has ended his life, the walls broke and all there is, is grief …Grief for me, who wasted a chance to find unexpected love - grief for him, who didn’t even know he had a son, such a strong and wild son, image of himself - and most of all grief for our son Eliah, who never knew his father, who only found condescension with my people, and whose mother never allowed him to see into her heart.
Until my uncle, in an attempt to humiliate him, told him the lie. The lie that I had told them upon my return. The lie to keep up the prideful walls around my heart. The lie that I had been brutally raped by his father, by Soren Barenson, the now head of the Barenson clan, and that he was the result of that rape.
So our brave and foolish son went to find him, and committed the deed that holds the heaviest guilt of all. And now he is on the run, uprooted, lost. And I wish I could turn back the wheel of time – wish I would have seen the truth, acknowledged the truth and told the truth…
