To a Father Long Passed

[DeusVult 564]

            While travelling along the roads, wanderers find about many different oddities. Some are useless bits and baubles, mayhaps tracks of a deer. This, however, is of a different nature. This is a letter, tacked to an unmarked tree in the forests of Almaris, with a bluish-gray dagger. It remains unopened, and will remainso, for many years to come.  

 

     Rin-

 

                     

How curiously time hath passed, makes me look back on the moments we shared with strange nostalgia. I remember you telling me not to fight for good, or for myself, but for you,

and my family. I remember how you taught me right from wrong, and good from evil. I remember you scolding me for speaking to Dragons, and I felt irritated. 

I now ponder why I felt that back then, perhaps it was my desire for independence, my desire to fight, and uncover adventure. It was why I had left for Karkosa, that dreaded realm. There I missed your passing, and your funeral. Where I had given up my family, my friends, my Father, only to be given the life I had desired; independence.

Independence is as it is; lonely. I don't feel any manlier, I don't feel any older for living alone. I feel cold, I feel as a shallow shell of who I once was. I remember once upon a time in our tavern, I was so excited to hear of my people and  the stories that were passed down to me. I now feel burdened with that knowledge, as if I am to bound to carry it to the next generation.

Each day, I feel, is longer than the last. Each day, I yearn to return to my life before, in the Commonwealth of Petra. Where Aviana and Wings would strut about, and you and I would run the tavern. A time not where I fight to have my culture survive, not a time where I felt my people were dying, but of a time of family, of friendship, and peace. These thoughts, these memories of a time long passed fill my head every night as I lay my back in my bedroll. 

But Father, it was you who taught me not to dwell on the past. You had taught me that looking back is not the way forward. I realize now I had wasted those years lamenting, brooding over my indecisiveness to stay with my family. I understand now what you had truly meant, when you say those words. Thinking of regret, thinking of the past and what could have been is riddled with wrong thoughts. It will throw you off a cliff into a pit which has no end.

I am now left with a choice, to return to Petra, take up your tavern and live a normal life as a barkeep, surrounded by friends, and carry on what you had given me, or to finish what I had started in That dreaded realm, and possibly open a jar which can not be shut close. The first choice seems easy, and, it is what you would want for me, but, I can not deep down in my heart, choose this. My people, our people, lay dead, slaughtered by Celia’nor, all because of that wretched man. To choose to live in blissful ignorance of that fact, is a weight on my heart upon which will prevent my happiness. 

It is with this final thought, I leave you with. I choose not to rest my head and live a long, prosperous life. I can not, for the horrors I bore witness to, for the calamity that was wrought, has slandered my once clean promise of a life well lived. I will return to that realm, I will seek this evil out, and destroy it. I will not live to regret this choice. For the key to all Adunians lies here.

Rest well, Rin. 

[MaltaMoss 1773]

In a cold and dimly lit room, an aged face scrunches up in visible frustration. Faded eyes scour the seemingly endless pages as the former bannerman seeks refuge in the text, hoping for a resolution to an undying question. It has eaten at him tirelessly, clawing away at the very fabric of his mind. Weeks turned to months, months turned to years, the sun rose and fell thousands of times. But Walter, the naïve and bright-eyed soldier who'd ventured into those horrors oh so long ago, still felt their eyes watching him as he moved on. He'd abandoned them there, he'd failed them. He'd left the man who saved his life to rot in the untold swath of the other world.

"Oh, oh GOD!"

He cried, desperate for his newfound faith to bring him solace. He could see them like it was yesterday, the Lord, the Ranger, the Dwarf. He still remembered their faces, all dulled and blurred by the tunnels.

"Damn you, why must you haunt me!"