Many years have passed since I was the boy struck with the lightning of the gods and thus became their thunder. Each year that has passed since then have I grown as a person and a priest, or so I like to think, but so too have my sorrows and pains. I have managed each as they come but also each passing year I am reminded a bit more loudly that the comfort I so desperately crave will never truly come to me while I still live here on this place, in this life, in this frail mortal body.
Each place I have come to call home has been beautiful and full of kind and wonderful people, though I suspect all places people call home are such, but still the persistent pain that has gnawed at me from before I could form thought remains in each. At this point I do not even know if I would function without the pain, what would drive me? What would be the fear that pushes my desire to save others a similar fate?
The monks of Ilmater tell me that pain has no true meaning, it is merely something to overcome if you wish to continue to exist, and such wisdom fills me not with ease but with strength. Perhaps I should have been an Ilmateri but I do not think I could turn from my god, not after all this. Not after the life I’ve lived and plan to continue to live.
So then at least some small mercy can be gained from all this when I see the people I care for, that I am responsible for, hurt and bruised and tortured and ransomed and the pain does not overwhelm me. That which does not kill you does not make you stronger but makes you weaker for the next attack. However in the mind of the wise it can offer you experience on how to handle the inevitable pain and loss that awaits you in the future and by this point I have much experience.
Perhaps it is an experience that I can share with my son in his recent defeat in battle, at his feeling of powerlessness, to help ease his suffering. The tears of the father for the suffering of his son cannot be fully explained on paper or by word, I cannot truly do justice for the feelings that I hold for him. At times like this I feel I cannot do justice at all. The weak fool that I am may Tyr guide me to bring the boy some comfort, something which I have been denied but have brought to others in the past.
Seen With Pale Eyes
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Fear
Fear greater than that which the deepest and most enraged dragon could ever conjure struck him. Him, my beloved husband whom I have stood back to back with in battle against tyrant, army, and fiends of hell. My sweetest and most cherished Movir would stand against the hells but writing a letter to long forsaken parents conjures to him grand sweeping fear.
I cannot say I do not understand. In battle you are either alive or you are not, your weapon struck your target or not, there is clean certainty of reality even among the chaos of battle and there’s a calming, if bloody, serenity to the grim beauty of it all. But letters to long lost family? There are many unknowns and the reply, whatever form it takes terrible or great and if it comes at all, can take months. And while I gave him my blessing to write them I tremble with fear of the alien at what sort of parents do that to a child.
I do not think I will ever be capable of understanding what sort of person can discard a child to the streets rather than sacrifice themselves to save the child. They sent him out because they say they couldn’t afford to care for him, what madness. My husband thinks they probably suspect him dead. I imagine getting a letter all these years after would be a shock. And if there is mercy to be had in all this; a relief. Though I cast judgment on them for what I think to be folly it is very likely they think with what they had done with great pain and suffering all these years later. 30 years. Are they alive still? Is one or not the other. Who knows.
I pray that some mercy can be extracted from this mess and not more suffering. Whatever the result he knows I love him, his son loves him, my parents and family love him. He is a Klennald now not a Peldiron whatever may come.
I cannot say I do not understand. In battle you are either alive or you are not, your weapon struck your target or not, there is clean certainty of reality even among the chaos of battle and there’s a calming, if bloody, serenity to the grim beauty of it all. But letters to long lost family? There are many unknowns and the reply, whatever form it takes terrible or great and if it comes at all, can take months. And while I gave him my blessing to write them I tremble with fear of the alien at what sort of parents do that to a child.
I do not think I will ever be capable of understanding what sort of person can discard a child to the streets rather than sacrifice themselves to save the child. They sent him out because they say they couldn’t afford to care for him, what madness. My husband thinks they probably suspect him dead. I imagine getting a letter all these years after would be a shock. And if there is mercy to be had in all this; a relief. Though I cast judgment on them for what I think to be folly it is very likely they think with what they had done with great pain and suffering all these years later. 30 years. Are they alive still? Is one or not the other. Who knows.
I pray that some mercy can be extracted from this mess and not more suffering. Whatever the result he knows I love him, his son loves him, my parents and family love him. He is a Klennald now not a Peldiron whatever may come.
Navigation
“When you seek war you will find peace, when you seek peace your will find war”, the warning of a god to a prophet received on the eve of my duty as Mayor. Fool that I am I did not fully grasp the gravity of the warning. What is the purpose and point of being a prophet if one does not understand the message given to them by their god? But then again prophets are not listeners, they are speakers, that is what the word prophet means, “speaker”. My worry that I do not understand the potency of a prophecy is much like the mouth that worries it cannot hear as well as the ear.
Regardless to be certain these are interesting times. Terrifying, confusing, worrying, exhausting, annoying. But such is how my life is by default so I can navigate easier I find. To be experienced in the art of being lost is a boon in the era of uncertainty. I find that while my body may have its limits my spirit is boundless.
But I posses experience of a different sort entirely. All those long hours studying law, politics, and human nature in the Halls of Justice strengthened my heart against many, though not all, of the pitfalls of leadership. Truly justice is not just the art of restoring that which was lost and answering of behalf of that which cannot be recovered, it is also the craft of preventing injury and wrongness from appearing in the first place when possible.
The experience of an exhausting lifelong nihilism and political theory in the church of Tyr have certainly been a boon in the years I’ve been Mayor, soon to be Lawspeaker, through times of war, peace, growth, loss, pain, and hope. Through it all we have been building a Republic, a government to help navigate the unknown in my eventual absence. Will it survive without me? Will it flourish into a model government? Will it die in a whimper and not a bang? Even the tools made to navigate the unknown have an unknown fate themselves. Nothing is certain.
Regardless to be certain these are interesting times. Terrifying, confusing, worrying, exhausting, annoying. But such is how my life is by default so I can navigate easier I find. To be experienced in the art of being lost is a boon in the era of uncertainty. I find that while my body may have its limits my spirit is boundless.
But I posses experience of a different sort entirely. All those long hours studying law, politics, and human nature in the Halls of Justice strengthened my heart against many, though not all, of the pitfalls of leadership. Truly justice is not just the art of restoring that which was lost and answering of behalf of that which cannot be recovered, it is also the craft of preventing injury and wrongness from appearing in the first place when possible.
The experience of an exhausting lifelong nihilism and political theory in the church of Tyr have certainly been a boon in the years I’ve been Mayor, soon to be Lawspeaker, through times of war, peace, growth, loss, pain, and hope. Through it all we have been building a Republic, a government to help navigate the unknown in my eventual absence. Will it survive without me? Will it flourish into a model government? Will it die in a whimper and not a bang? Even the tools made to navigate the unknown have an unknown fate themselves. Nothing is certain.