Morning Sorrows

[Jonel]

Lying in her bed, eyes blank, she appears to stare at the ceiling, her breaths are shallow making it seem as if the life had left her body. While she appeared to be either dead or sleeping, her mind was raging with multiple thoughts, some of them concerning the people she had to hurt to keep safe, others about her position and purpose in the church. Many other thoughts similar to those weaved a net through her mind causing her emotions to ebb and wane, along with her emotions, and in sync with them, dark hued colors surround her hands flaring to life and dying down again. Without warning tears well up in her eyes and flow down the side of her face soaking into her hair and pillow.

Slowly she begins to stir and extracts herself from the sheets of her bed and moves to the Mirror. The mirror, built for either a human or elf, showed her reflection of tangled hair, red rimmed eyes, and the scars she has acquired through her life along with the tattoos on her face. As she stares solemnly at herself she fingers the only item on her person, an amulet. As her gaze falls on the amulet her eyes again fill with tears and she collapses, falling to her knees sobbing quietly as memories bombard her. Memories of the only true happiness she has known, the memories of her Handsome. Silent and strong, and in her eyes perfect............

[grant]

Near the Viridale border but far off the beaten track is a small shelter, barely adequate for the hin that inhabitants it. As the forests other residents wake for the day, the birdsong wakes him. Stretching beneath the rough wool blanket before flinging it off and sitting up he takes stock of his surroundings. Seeing that things are in order, and no little critters invaded his stocks again, he looks up at the shelf above his head pensively.

Kneeling he begins his daily prayers, tears filling his eyes, he prays for her first, always first. He never told her this, but he began doing so when she became more important to him than any other. He prays, sobbing now, that she be guided back from the dark path she now walks, that he was to weak to turn her from himself.

After several minutes he composes himself. With honest passion he rededicates his life to service, prays to be forgiven for faltering, and for failing to save her. Finishing his prayers he reaches up and places his hand on the blade of the axe resting on the shelf, he can feel with out looking that the smooth silver coating remains on the rougher iron beneath. He sighs softy and begins preparing for the day.

He steps out of his hut, to goes to watch the path leading into the Viridale, to watch that kin entering do eventually leave. As he walks to the place he will make his post for the day, her final words to him echo in his mind. Blinking back further tears he knows that with out her, they will never come true, he will never find happiness.

[Jonel]

Sitting in the brush watching the male hin from the shadows, lay a feline with eyes that hold more intelligence and interest then is natural. After a few hours of observing the man the feline stands and stretches in a lazy manner and saunters off his tail swishing back and forth as he returns to the Tattooed faced woman he called master.

[grant]

A nightmare wakes him. Not the same one that woke him the night before, and not the one from the night before that. This dream was about the drowning of a child, one he could not save, only fish from the river and carry to her bereaved parents. The night before that it was about the death of a cousin who was trampled beneath the hooves of a runaway caravan team. He was not even present when it happened, but attended the burial rites with the rest of his family and viewed the body in state. The dream before that was about a companion on the battlefield, one who fell both out of sight and far away from his portion of the melee.

He curls in pain more acute than any wound sustained in battle and weeps, praying that the rest of the night passes quietly. Slowly fading off to sleep, to forget the dream, at least until the morning when it will be a memory that haunts him for the rest of the day.

The dreams are all different yet they all end the same way, with him turning over the child, stepping up to the the casket, or pulling the body of a fallen goblin off his companion, it is not their faces that are reveled. It is hers, the one he loves more than any other. It is her face on the body of kin he was unable to save and as yet unrealized, was not meant to.

He must wake to that quickly, thinks the sender, not meant to. Not yet; perhaps never.

[grant]

There was a storm this night in the Viridale, no worse and many others that have passed through in the past. This time however the large tree can no longer withstand the passage of the wind, its core hollowed out by disease and decay causes it to topple, crushing the small shelter below. A shelter that was vacant, its inhabitant unable to return this night, or any other. In the morning a hin lumber axe can bee seen protruding from the wreckage, the haft decorated by the fur of a dire wolf.