I sit here writing this in the Rolling Inn of Fartown, Isolde at my feet in the flickering firelight playing with the toy bear Richard so kindly and skillfully made for her . The firelight dances of the midnight stone eyes, seeming to give it a life my little one finds most apealing. I know it has been of great comfort to her over the past difficult days. My hope is that here the two of us can find peace and sanctuary of a kind that has been sorely lacking in recent days.
It amazes me still to think that it was only perhaps three weeks ago that Steel escorted me along the long path to this place. It, amazingly, reminds me much of the place where I was born. It is also constructed almost entirely of tough woven grass, the only plants that many of could survive in the Land as the climate worsened to desert. It is made as a fortress against the many dangers that surround it, but I feel oddly... sheltered here, comforted, protected. A womb, of a kind. After the cold, magnificent face of Branishor where I ahve felt so isolated and alone... most especially, it feels like a sanctuary.
So much has occurred over the past days. I have been upgraded to the fourth-and-twentieth level of skill, as the most I can say for these long and lonely patrols is that they most certainly improve one's skills with the sword! But more than that, much has occurred at a personal level. There seems to be a great deal of discord in Valorn at the moment. Perhaps this is a mistaken impression caused by my own current staus as a virtual outcast in the edge of the wilds, but ht eonly people I have seen truly happy in recent days would be Redti and Jinx, who are preparing for their uncoming bonding. I am to perform it. I hope it's fate is better than the first I performed...
And here to the true story. I performed the bonding of Crmin Wolfe and Ildara Bright-Eyes a little time ago. I knew both a little, and thought most well of them. I was pleased to have been asked, as I had mentored Ildara a little when she first arrived in Valorn but then lost track of her, and I was afraid I had offended or upset her in some way... I even fancied she was trying to avoid me. The bonding itself went well, and ever since, Ildara had been sneding me small messages if friendship. She seemed to ahve heard a hint of the unhappy circumstances of my life somewhere, and seemed deeply affected, wishing to comfort me. I had told her only to find joy in her own situation, as I knew the fragility of joy so well. She became most insistent about trying to help me. I like the women a great deal; I always have, and so I met up with her to talk as she asked me to. She...confessed to me that she was in love with someone who was not her husband. The aprrehension crashed in on me as her lips formed the words "My dear Venus...it is you..."
It of course caused me great pain to hear this. I am a bad person for anyone to love. I seem to hurt people without ever meaning to. Xanthias... I ahve recieved a single note from him since he has gone away, and that long ago. I know not if my reply ever reachged him. I know not of he still lives. And Ildara... she seemed to regard it as a terrible thing that she confessed such a thing to me. She talked as if the love of a woman for a woman was a sinful thing. I found out later that she had fled her homeland after she and her lover there were condemed to death for imrpoper love. The thought sickens me as yet. No matter the barabrity of my homeland... we were never like that. If it had been so... Aquila would have been put to death before ever i met him. Unbelievable... that anyone would think of doing such a thing for a matter of love...
The worse thing of all was that she took my rejection of her love, for my heart is broken and frozen and a thing that causes all those who care for me only pain, as a sign that I too thought as they did. I have to admit that I was form in my rejection. Xanthias has taught me that much at least. And I have to say that I was never a lover of women. Her soul seemed one raw wound that everything I did only opened more, until I broke down and wept to see what I was doing to her. And yet, I could not do otherwise. I cannot be what I am not. I cannot love her.. It is much better for evceyone that I do not love anyone. When I think of the damage I caused... there are times when i think Mistress Venteli was right to shun me so, though her reasons were so ridiculous. When I think of Elysian growing up without his father... when I think of Xanthias in pain and danger somewhere, alone... I see myself lower than the lowest thing that crawls in N'Rolav.
And when I saw what I was doing to Ildara...
In the end, I drew the story of her past from her as gently as I could. I told her of its paralells with my own, I told her how barbaric even I saw her country as, how a mere feeling and quite definitely the kind of love she had given to her lover was no sin. Tha Valorn was a new land of good and kind people who would, by and by, accept her for who she was. I think... I hope, I pray... that in the end, I convinced her. She walked away , in pain, but with a new straightness to her spine I had not seen in her before.

I have taken on a duty from the Seynod of the Great Temple for a while to patrol the paths between Branishor and Fartown, over the mountains and the Grasslands, to keep them free from bandits and centaurs who waylay travellers. It is cold, lonely, difficult work, but at least it serves the Temple and allows Isolde and I a place to live in the Inn of Good Health in Branishor. I make periodic trips back to Milltown and Dundee here and there. I miss them a great deal. Though it is getting a little more familiar t me now, this City still wears its stranger's face to me. I do not believe it can ever ring with the quiet fellowship I found in Milltown...
But on one of these flying visits home, I had the great joy of seeing Mylor again. it had been some time, with his absences and mine. I caught him briefly in the Dundee Inn a day or two ago, but last night we met in the aftermath of Cat and Jake's wedding. I have missed him. No one makes me laugh as he does, or makes me feel that he will always have my back. The first true friend I made in Valorn.
He seemed rather down at first, though. He told me that Llye has also been in Branishor for much of the past month, even though I have not seen her. It seems she is taking advantage of the nobility gifted to her by her mysterious benefeactor to go and search for them. I am glad not to be moving in the circles she is (being surrounded by nobles is about the only thing that could make Branishor more uncomfortable than it is) but it would be good to see a friendly face there, some time...
I know he misses her. I hope... how dearly I hope they are all right. After thehere a few words are scribbled out I just...hope they are all right. They deserve to be.
I asked him not to speak of me to Mistress Venteli. I just... I do nto want him mixed up in this. He is my closest friend in Valorn, and that...woman knows it. With Llye away... I can see all too clearly how that poisonous mind could twist things. I hate to have to think so, but I truly do not wish he and Llye to be mixed up in this, in any way whatsoever. They have such joy together, such love. It lessens the burden on my heart a little every day to know that such love can still exist in the world.

Words.
I shall never understand them. After all these years, they still sit in my mouth and my throat like something vomited up from dark places they should not be able to get out of. As though I am bringing up arrows made of broken bones out of the very depths of myself, cutting my own throat as I send them deadly towards their target. Leaving me helplessly choking on my own blood as I watch them inflict damage. As I once did as a sniper, but then I was always hidden or at the very least amongst a crowd. Now I sit here naked to the pain in the eyes of the other as I inflict it.
It hurts.
Danin... on the few rare occasions I seek respite from Branishor's cold face in flying visits to Milltown, I seem to see him often. He seems to be seeking something in myself, in Isolde. Redemption? For past sins? Or past pain?
He may know. I do not. He is such an odd mix of arrogance and abjection I cannot seem to ever quite catch an equilibrium with him. Always being toissed a way I never meant to go. And the result? Barbed words.
He seems...obsessed with Isolde and I. That I shall not call myself her mother, and cannot call her my daughter. It seems impossible to be that a man who has suffered what I know he has can remian such a child in so many ways. He calls on want, want , want, with no respect for what must be. What is neccessary. What is the truth. Perhaps this is what a birthing in a fairytale land makes one. He would never have survived a famine. He would not speak so had he not known the truth of children crying for food that cannot be given because you do not have it, and even when it is there must be rationed to keep life in them longer. How can a grown man have such an endless and boundless stire of what he wabts to be so, with so little reference to what is.
I am not Isolde's mother.
I did not birth her. I did not carry her within me. Her blood is not mine own. She did not emerge from me screaming into the Light.
None of this changes that I love her. That she is all my love, all my life, the red life of my heart. That I would kill or die for her in any moment, and count myself blessed as I fell. That she is all my joy. That she is enought to keep me fighting every moment to be alive.
These truths sit by each other. I am not Isolde's mother. I love her as a daughter. They do not cross. They are two sides of a triangle. But Danin does not seem to see this. He bellows contempt at me for not giving Issy what he claims she wants from a spoken parrot-line of "Mama".
I would move heaven and N'Rolav for her to be my daughter. But she is not, and that truth cannot be changed. So I can be the third line of the triangle. I can be who Aquila was for me. The Light knows I loved Aquila. He brought me back. He gave me my name, my humanity back. He was more to me than whoever fathered me in such measure that I cannot count it, and I pray every night to the Gods that he knew what I could never tell him through my frozen throat. That I loved him.
But he was not my father.
If Isolde loves me even near how I loved Aquila, how I love him still, wherever he is, then any sacrifice I could make for her is beyond worthwhile. Beyond that, all names, all sounds, even the words of Danin Stone who speaks so much and knows so little, put into Isolde's mouth... all disappear.
Love need not be titled. Love endures.

It is chilly here...

I am far, far from where I have become accustomed to being, once again a stranger in an (almost) strange land. I have visted Branshior, the city of my profession, a number of times, of course, for instruction, for my own Ring and to accompany my pupils in their quests for their own, to see the Elucidator. In the name of the Light, I first met Mylor while waiting for the ferry to this place! But nonetheless, in all its splendour, this city quite definitely wears a stranger's face to me. But, for the time being, it seems best....
I have exiled Isolde and myself to this chilly, splendid place for a reason. It is some time since Mistress Venteli and I have began to get along badly. I believe, in fact, that I can trace it to the illness that afflicted me some time ago. In my delirium, Mylor, Alastair and Redti aided me in moving from the inn without her knowledge, on my own request. I have never let her know why I did this, nor why I returned without warning some days later, carried, unwillingly I might add, by Steel, pale, gaunt and weak. This lack of confession from me has seemed to eat at her, fueling a malice I could not have believed from her apparent kindness when Issy was a sickly scrap of an infant. She has somehow continually taken it all in the worst possible light, even when this makes no sense.
She has never made any secret of the fact that she has always thought Issy my own child, that I have concealed the relationship through shame. She ahs persisted in this no matter how I tried to dissuade her, and has often made remarks about how she could help a young woman with a child find a more respectable way of life. This, my refusual to talk to her about what happened while I was away, and a few other things have somehow seemed to fuel the worst kinds of speculation in the woman's mind. She had been making catty remarks about it for some days, but the final straw came last night. She came up suddenly and came upon me rereading the letter Xanthias had given to me before he left, as Issy slept on the couch beside me.
She accused me of being a drabe. Everything, all the gossip I ahve ever heard about what occurred between Xanthias, Danica and I came out in the worst possible fashion, twisted almost beyond recognition but for a few seeds of truth which seemed to make the whole thing much more barbed. And much more, about the men who are closest to me here, about Mylor, Steel, and all of my pupils, especially Alastair, Redti, and Danin. About men I chat casually to when I meet them, about friends and Guildmates. It was hateful. It took my breath.
And then, finally, the worst of all. She looked at Issy, still sleeping in the candlelight as her tirade, venomous though it was, had been delivered in a tone low enough not to disturb her tired slumber. She looked at her and said that I was not fit to be her mother, that I was bringing her up to be a drabe like myself. That she should be taken from me.
I drew my sword. I did not even know I had done so before I heard the silken sound of it slipping from the scabbard. The woman's eyes fixed on it momentarily, but, right after that, on my face. The anger in me was great that my face did not feel like my own, but like a carven thing, made only to hold my wrath. I felt almost as if I was watching myself from a far place as I held the sword up, as the blade caught the candlelight and the moonlight from the window. It was close to her frightened plump face.
I heard my own voice say "Look to this, you ignorant woman. Look to this sword. It is this blade, wielded in my hand, that stands between you and the end of all your foolishness and your malice and your lies. That stands between you and the end of everything you have ever known and ever loved." I stood back then, and retirned the sword to its scabbard, and felt my voice come from between my own lips. "And I will stand. For even you do not deserve what I have seen and I have endured. Even you do not deserve the end of hope." I leant down and gathered Issy up into my arms, folded the letter back into my tunic as I did so. "I shall never, while the Gods grant me breath, or beyond, leave Issy to the likes of you. She is pure, and joyful, and all hope. To me, and to the others who I hope never never hear how their honourable names have been used." I gathered up my pack, as Issy, half awakened by the movement and the steel in my voice, curled her arms around my neck. "Stay here, safe, in your venom. I hope it chokes you." And I left.
I took the next ferry to Branishor. I shall be back, later, when I can bear to look on Milltown again. For now it feels to me like a nest of snakes. And, after that, the even cold face Branishor wears is rather more welcoming.

I have learned a new blessing! The Anointment of Ben's Strength! It is quite different from the other three Blessings to my hand as all of them attach themselves to objects, where this one settles into the bones and flesh of the one who is Blessed, much like a Healing but giving even greater power and strength than the one Blessed should naturally have.
I felt oddly guided to the Guardian who carried this crystal with him. I was up in the mountains training hard as I ahve been for the past few days, when I felt a sudden urge to turn aside and head along the well-worn path to the tombs. I felt oddly led as I trod the dusty passages of the tombs, as if I was following a pth laid out for me. Surely enough, I turned down an unfamilar side path and there he was, shining golden in the light of my Ring, and I fought him. As ever, his strength was great and he never tired, but I he moved in the same odd clumsy manouveres and I detsroyed him easily,. I leant over the shattered remains and saw, in the shattered wreckage of his hemlet, the golden glow of the intact crystal. I carried it to Branishor, where I gained this new power with the kind aid of the Elucidator and of Temple Guardian Lyndhen.
I have the oddest feeling I may be needing it very soon.

(here, a slight wobble and a blot on the pageI do appear to be gaining pupils like wildfire... I can occasionally picture Aquila's or Naranthil's faces if they could see the earnest faces of adventurers (all but one, so far, older than I) as they ask me to be their sponsor and guide into the noble profession of Cleric. I can picture those shocked faces so clearly that it occasionally makes me wish to giggle; not the response such an honurable request deserves, of course, and so I have always so far managed to hide it.
At any rate, it appears I have gained another worthy pupil - Danin. Lord Danin, I should say now, as he has also been elcted to the council. It looks as though my time on that noble body may be ending, which does not bother me - despite the honour, I have always been uncomfortable being mistaken for a noble by those who do not know. I am deeply honoured to serve as I am asked of course, and would never lay that sacred responsability aside unless another was elected to take my place. Danin will do well. It is good for him to have something else linking him to this land and to its people.
Particularly as I am thinking that much of the reason he has chosen the path of the Ring is that he is afeared that the darkness that claimed the lives [I](here, a slight wobble and a small inkblot of the page) of the rest of his family shall yet return for him. I asked him straight out, reasoning that I must learn to be blunt with him at times if I am going to to teach him. I hope he is ready. Not all the lessons I must give him will be so, and there is always the possibilty the temple may reject him, or so the whispered tales go...
I mean to help him. That we could not prevent the darkness, whatever it was, from comsuming Savannah Stone, is reprehensible. And my own actions...No. I do not want to think of those. They happened, and that is that. But whatever the responsability, Danin is a friend now. So I shall help him, by whatever means I can.
I wonder if he is right...that I hav never told him anything fof my past? I suppose I do not advertise it, except when need to. I find I am reluctant to speak of it, though that is unfair, as I know so much about Danin's life. If I am to teachhim, there must be honesty between us. Though still - he trusts me, as much as anyone in this land. Must I tell him more? I do not want to upset him...and there are faces I do not wish to dredge up.
If he asks, I shall tell him. If not... we shall have to see.