>>5778563You’d taken a lot of time after the… INCIDENT with the Archmage, to reflect on why there’s BEEN an incident at all. Why DID you feel the need to step in? You know what Pearce would say, albeit in jest, if he was here: that your obsession with Henzler was some sort of crush. Well.. Maybe it was, but if so it was also merely a phase, and an subconscious phase at that. Just like your sense of ‘rivalry’ with Izirina Henzler had began to fade as you made your own mark and stepped out of her shadow and onto a distinct path, you had grown beyond that juvenile fixation!
(Even if. Physically, you had hardly grown at all…)
No, in truth it was not romance that moved your feet, nor altruism, but the contempt which only familiarity could breed. You had seen the way Henler’s mother had acted, heard those words—that something was ‘wrong with’ your young rival—and it had taken you back, right back to Iternagreyn and even before then, to the little grove of Nitrea where you were born and brought up before your magical gifts proved worthy of the elven capitol…
Or, rather, before your mother could not longer stand the sight of you.
“I know what it’s like,” you’d finally choked out, the words like rising bile on your tongue, your stomach churning as if you’d truly vomited them forth. “Your mother and mine… I think they’d have a lot to talk about. About disappointing children.”
Henzler stared at you for a moment, confused, and then her face fell.
“You think I’m a disappointment, too…?”
Ugh.
“That’s not what I—look, I’m saying that… I know what it’s like. To have a mother who… Who doesn’t LIKE you, the way mothers are meant to do, alright? When I heard your mother speaking to you like that… Well, I didn’t think. I just reacted. Maybe I… PROJECTED a little bit, and said to her what… What I wish I’d been able to say to mine.”
Of course, you’d been only ten when you were FIRST banished from a place, albeit not from the Fair Folk as whole—the human equivalent of a five or six year-old, at a time when most elflings are still toddlers. Maybe that was why she’d done it—sent you away, never written you. How surreal must it be, you wonder, to see your child growing, aging, approaching DEATH at twice the rate one would expect? To turn one’s back for a moment, then look back and see your child has grown taller and older in a relative instant?
…To know that you will outlive your own baby?
“There’s no excuse for it,” you said sternly, to yourself as much as to Henzler.
