Azarad

Azarad,

                If you are reading these papers, then I am dead. I hope that I will live long enough to teach you these stories myself - but that is not a luxury our people can afford for me to rely on.

When I am gone, the future of our kind will be in your hands. You must lead the Sha’sal Khou in my stead, and unify our sundered people so that we may at last break free from our enslavement to the Ghaik.

I do not know if you will have the chance to know me. If you did not, then I am sorry. If you did, then - I am more so. You were born into this world, not out of love, but out of necessity, and I am bound by my oath to the Sha’sal Khou. Yours will be a cruel upbringing, either by my hand, or Zetch’r’r’s, if I do not survive. 

This is the way it must be. I know this; in time, you will come to know it too. Train hard, both in body and in mind - you must be strong enough to bear the burden of your fate.

It is your only hope.

Mother

Why did I torture myself, reading that letter yet again? It said the same things it always said, it conveyed the same coldness she had always borne towards me when she was alive. But somehow, each time I remembered it, I managed to convince myself that there must be something in it I’d missed.

I knew that there wasn’t. Of course I did. I knew exactly who my mother was, and exactly how she felt about me; a duty, a burden. A puppet to be trained to do the work of the Sha’sal Khou. A bitter disappointment, ultimately.

I wasn’t what I had been made to be, and she despised me for it. I didn’t blame her. The hopes of an entire people had rested on us; on her ability to shape me into some sort of hero. But she had failed, and we both knew it. In time, they all would.

I think I had truly believed that I was the problem. That if I could have been better, she would have loved me again. I had thought that she must have cared about me once. But that letter - it told the truth. I was never anything more than a necessity to her.