Role

Chapter 1

Dear Journal,

I left Darsylon today...but it didn't feel like home any longer. Mother was
distraught, to say the least, but resigned to the fact I couldn't stay. I
expected her to fight me on it, but I suppose an elven woman who would lay
willingly with a wildling human emissary expected that her own son would
also be dissatisfied with life in Darsylon.

I suppose we dealt with it in our own ways. She couldn't leave, but she
found a glimpse of freedom in the arms of my father.

I met him once, when I was old enough to remember, though I didn't know
who he was until long after he had left again. A shaman of the storm,
he was a passionate, wild-eyed man decorated with tattoos that sparked
my imagination--tattoos of wild things and places. I do not remember him
making any expression other than an easy smile, as he asked me trivial
things about my life. My favorite colour, what I enjoyed doing with my
time.

I think even then he had hoped, secretly, that she would let him take me
along on his travels, but High Elven society barely accepted me, and she
knew that once I left I would forever be barred from a life with her.

He was a man of vision, she said, which was why she was drawn to him to
begin with. Calling no city his home, he instead spent his time living
among the wild things, but visiting those within the more civilized lands
seeking...something. Perhaps he wasn't looking for anything in particular,
but instead doing his best to bring something to those he visited.

Mother said he spoke often of the purity of the wilds, of how he never once
met a natural creature that took joy in another's pain. Even those creatures
that relied on the violence of the hunt to survive did so not out of some
perverted animosity, but because it was part of the cycle of life and death.

In this, they were united--both were inherently good people, who wouldn't
stand for cruelty in any form. I hope to take the best of them both with
me out into the world...wherever I might end up.