[Ana]

Remembrance

Three weeks. Three weeks I’ve been following him, pushing myself ever farther into the nightmare brightness of the Overworld’s day, only to stumble, exhausted, into a never ending series of recently deserted campsites. My anger and frustration grew with each passing day and as I continued my journey, something…changed within me. My thoughts grew dark, my dreams filled with violent, bloody images. I was so consumed with anger that at times my sight seemed to blur, the edges of my vision taking on a bloody, red hue and I imagined I heard a dark voice whispering, urging me to find Julian and make him pay. As these episodes increased, a new emotion crept into my mind. Fear. Fear of what I would do when I finally caught up with Julian. Fear that I was becoming all too comfortable with the spider-hilt dagger at my side. Fear that I was losing my mind. Despite the fear, I pushed on. Memories of hauntingly beautiful music and a pair of dark, ever changing eyes would bring a wave of longing and hurt, closely followed by the anger that had become my constant companion. And I knew I had to find him. I had to make him pay. I had to know why.

I had stopped to eat a midday meal of water from the river, meat from a small, long eared animal I had brought down the night before and my newest treasure. A handful of large, sweet blackberries I had found growing on a nearby bush. I had tasted blackberries once before, as a child, and the thick, sweet taste brought back surprisingly pleasant memories.

The Matron of a rival House had invited my mother to dine with her and I, as the only daughter of our House, was invited along. The dinner was an elaborate affair, consisting of several rare delicacies brought back from a raid on a Surface elf village, the rarest being a huge bowl of plump, ripe blackberries. The atmosphere was tense, filled with political maneuvering, double meanings and thinly veiled threats, poorly hidden behind a façade of hospitality. I noticed none of it. All of my attention was taken by the delightful sweetness of the blackberries.

At the end of dinner my mother’s rival, having noticed how taken I was with the blackberries, gave me a handful of the treats to take home, smiling in what I thought was friendly indulgence. As we were headed home, I commented to my mother how nice it had been for the Matron to share such rare food with us. My mother looked at me with something very near to pity in her eyes, and not a little fear. She explained, speaking in that slow manner people tend to use around the simple, that the Matron hadn’t invited us to dinner to be nice, but to take the opportunity to assert her House’s dominance over ours. To flaunt, through her oh, so generous gift, the riches that our House lacked. I frowned down at the berries in my hand and declared that if they were meant to hurt her feelings then I wouldn’t eat any more of them. My mother’s eyes widened in surprise and she started at me so intently that I thought she was angry and was going to punish me for being slow, as she sometimes did. But, after a long moment, she simply sighed and shook her head, muttering under her breath about letting me spend too much time with my father. She hesitated a moment and then put her hand on my shoulder in an unusually gentle manner and told me to go ahead and eat the blackberries. After all, it would be rude to refuse such a generous gift. Too young, and shockingly naïve for a Drow child, to recognize the bitterness behind her words, I simply smiled and had happily devoured the blackberries by the time we returned home.

Nearly one hundred year later I sat, savoring once more the wonderful sweetness of blackberries and indulging in one of the few pleasant childhood memories I had. I was nearly finished with my meal, when a sound came drifting through the forest. A sound at once so foreign, yet so achingly familiar, that it took me a several moments to recognize it. Music. The same music that had drawn me from my cave so many weeks ago. His music. I sat in stunned silence for a moment before scrambling to my feet, the blackberries forgotten, and hurrying towards what I knew would be, one way or another, the end of my obsession.