No one is born a monster. All monsters are created, nurtured, and only grotesque in the beholder’s eye. I never considered myself a monster at all, but instead a caretaker, a protector, or a champion. I couldn’t make Ginny understand how my actions showed how I much needed her, needed to take care of her—not that I wanted to destroy her.
After all, breaking her was merely a step on the way to protecting her. Once she was more compliant, she could see how dangerous the world was and how safe she was with me. I just needed her to stop being so stubborn and pay attention. Then she would have understood. She would have loved me back and been loyal to me. She would have been mine.
So, I guess you know everything about me already, don’t you? You’ve listened to the Nature Walker or, worse, the Rajah of Qatu’anari, and they’ve told you I have no soul. Or, perhaps, you’ve heard from the First Caeth of Alynatalos about how I use my comrades in arms as collateral damage in order to further my agenda. Or her sister, that simpering red-headed wretch who became a Guardian of all things. I’m sure she had plenty to tell you about the time that we were together, when I tried to help her use her talents to serve the greater good. Selfish, all of them.
You may think you know all about me, but you don’t. I’m just a flat figure in your mind, an image of the worst possible being you can imagine. A drawing of a monster, lurching toward an innocent victim. Maybe that’s accurate. Or maybe that’s all I want you to see—that’s all I wanted any of them to see. Maybe that image of me keeps me safe…from you.
I tried letting one of them see me, know me down to my soul—my Ginny. I still see her as she was before everything happened that led to me being here…wherever here is. That upturned face and those freckles sprinkled across her skin. Those light blue eyes that could see past all of my bluster and boorishness and find me. But she was no more honest than any of them in the end. Never trust your heart to a wood elf—it will be the end of you, just like it was the end of me.
If only I’d started off with that Ikedrian. She was loyal, strong, and so lovely. She and I could have ruled Orana…if the wood elf hadn’t gotten in the way. But it is too late—I am so much stardust floating in the Void now. The last cruel act in a long life of cruelty and pain was left to the All-Mother, Sephine, when she reduced me to dust and left me to hang in the perpetual night sky of the Void. From time to time, I wonder if Indarr even knew or cared that I was gone, after all those years of dedicated loyalty to the god of justice. It was too late to worry about that, wasn’t it? The Father Dragon made it back to the mortal world…so it was possible for all souls, wasn’t it? All souls like mine…
Enough of that. I let all of them know too much. I let myself know them. That knowledge became a hindrance, gave familiarity, bred sympathy.That knowledge made me weak. Familiarity breeds weakness. Weakness is death.
I look back now on that mantra that I learned during my days of training as a wizard in the service of the god of Calder’s Port, Indarr, and it amuses me. “Fear is weakness, weakness is death! There is no justice in death!” The cadets in the Temple to Indarr still chant that to this day—I can hear them if I am close enough in the night sky to the southern part of the continent. The bravado and courage I had as a young man astonishes me, honestly. How did that strength and confidence lead me to where I am now?
And we’ve circled back around to the Nature Walker, haven’t we? I don’t want to spend this entire missive whimpering like a lovesick pup over her. Suffice it to say, I loved her, to the absolute depths of my soul. I adored her. She just didn’t understand—and clearly, considering the path her own life has taken, was not capable of that sort of love… at least not on her own, anyway.
Back to that young man that I was, who left Alynatalos for the Temple to Indarr, only to be waylaid by that human, Belzhar. He seemed so intelligent and gifted when I first met him outside the Temple. The most talented wizard of his age—or at least that’s what he told me. And I was naïve enough to not only believe him, but to be taken in by him and his “School of Wizards.” It would still make my blood boil, if I had blood, to remember how weak he turned out to be. School indeed. Many magic users have taken me on as a student, required me to call them Master or Mistress, and promised to teach me how to use the power of Orana herself. Many of them had the strength I coveted—the strength I needed to rule Orana. But not him. Belzhar was the weakest of them all.
I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let me start back at the beginning, before I was even a young man in Alynatalos, dreaming of a life in the sorcerer’s guild and power beyond any imagination.