Hope and Sorrow

“MOTHER!”

The mob of men were shouting, screaming about sins and abominations and heresy, and dragging a small elven woman out from the tiny village of Bobick. Behind their throng, a child scampered to keep up, screaming for her mother. The men ignored her, unless she got to close, and then one of them would back hand her or toss her aside.

They had burst into the small home only minutes before, taking many of the pre-Rending relics her mother had kept. Only a few of the most sacred relics had been hidden in the stuffing of the child’s toys, though she only barely remembered them being sewn into the dolls. The men claimed that heretics should not keep such blessed relics, and that they were rightfully the followers of those whom they had belonged to.

Now they were dragging and beating her mother, one reciting a long list of crimes the woman had committed, though to the ears of the child and many of the Halflings that had been near, they sounded more like fanatical lies than truths. But these men were filled with zeal and clung so desperately to their beliefs, anyone who questioned them found a sword pointed at their throats.

“Men, what did the Hero do to evil when he found its taint among the pure?” their leader shouted above the taunts.

He was met with a rowdy cheer; the words destroy, eliminate and kill dancing together in a cacophony of madness. They stopped at a large wooden pole that had been erected in the sand, pressing the elven woman against it and tying her there with leather cords while some continued to beat her.

“Correct! And now we have tracked this heretic to theses shores, and as the Hero of old would, we must rid the world of her evil!” the man yelled, his eyes wild with insanity. “Such darkness can be purged only by light! May fire burn away the taint of this woman and cleanse Norrath!”

Several men carried tinder to the makeshift stake, wrapping the elven woman’s feet with brittle and dry twigs. The little girl had made her way through the throng of men, and tried to pull the tinder away until one of them dragged her away screaming.

“MOTHER!”

In horror, the child watched as two men lowered their torches to the tinder and their fire sparked the wood into flame. She looked up at her mother’s face, their eyes meeting; her mother was terrified, but something in her eyes drifted to a calm anger mixed with a worried love. Within minutes, flames engulfed the elven woman, though she refused to scream in terror and instead looked up towards the darkening skies.

The men cheered as her body burned, and finally the child found herself freed from the grasp of rough hands. She ran close to the fires, screaming for her mother as she sunk to her knees, crying. As she wailed, the men began marching back towards the docks, their holy work done and the evil burning away from the face of Norrath, all in the name of their Hero. They were proud men, delighting in following their Sai by destroying darkness with light, and their act of valor would burn brightly in their minds for years to come.

None of them would remember the child they left crying. None of them would ever think about the other side of the story, of killing a mother while her child looked on in terror. They would not waste a precious care over how that child would survive alone, or what would become of a little girl who had witnessed their righteous act in the wilds of the Enchanted Lands.

The child knelt in the sand, crying until long after her mother’s flesh was burned from her body. When there was nothing but ash left, the child crawled to the ruins, gathering up handfuls of the ash and holding them as she cried. She found a large shell near by, and began to shovel the ashes into with her hands; when it was full she would walk to the ocean and carefully dump the ashes into the wind and the water before gathering up more.

Amid the ash and sand she found her mother’s circlet, the strange metal mostly unharmed by the intense fires. The child held it to her chest and cried for a very long time before continuing, though after some time she was no longer alone – the Halflings of Bobick brought their own shells to the ashes, and helped her take them down to the sea in silence.



"Was it the right thing to do?"

There was a long moment of silence in the marble hall before a beautifully resonate voice replied, "Yes."

Silence descended upon the hall, deafening in its own right. The pair of beautiful woman walked slowly, the whispering of their long skirts the only sound. For a long moment in Time, they walked, the hall seeming to stretch into eternity, until finally they stopped and faced each other.

"It is only fair, yes?" the first asked. "That we give a life without our interference?"

"I would think so, yes. And since we are making an exodus," the resonate voice replied, "there shall be no interference from anyone. But was it necessary to destroy the memories?"

Another long silence descended the hall and the pair turned and walked forward again, marble column after marble column passing on either side of them. After some time, they stopped to speak to each other once more, turning to face one another in the impossibly long hall.

"It was, there would be no other way to entirely remove our influances," the first replied.

Nodding, they turned and continued their walk down the enternal hallways, the world of Norrath barely visible in the distance behind them, slowly fading away entirely.