Life Vs. Death

Dead – That is the state that many thought of me in the months that followed Visus’s birth. Was this intentional? Of course not. I couldn’t do that to my family and friends. I didn’t realize that when Valkryn and Siona aided the droppleganger, that they ensured that it would continue to look like me even after it died.

That really shouldn’t have surprised me considering I am certain that Valkryn was attempting to ensnare Andrew the Green in a grand scheme that would have had him tried and convicted of my murder. Honestly, I highly doubt that Drew would be capable, even in his wildest nightmares, of being able to do so. Of course, Valkryn wouldn’t have done such a thing unless he was certain it could be done. I am thankful to find out that it was all for naught.

Some would wonder, why I would do such a thing. Why I would go along with something that put my son, my little brother, and myself in such a precarious situation. Especially, knowing that Gia wished to obtain my son for House Navere as a prince of the house. The simplest of explanations is to ask a person what kind of mood would they be to resist, when they are seven seasons pregnant and bigger, almost literally, than a house. Then again, nothing in my life is ever that simple.

There are a few things that I know about the way things work around me. The first of these is House Navere itself. Whether Matron Navere likes the thought of this or not, I am a member of the house. If for no other reason than the fact that she kills me, she kills her brother Thaydin. That’s the die I rolled when I became his bonded wife. At the time it situated the means of which to protect me. Would I have done it anyway? Yes, eventually, I would have. I have said it before, and I will say it again. My husband is my addiction. I know that with him it is the same, even if he wouldn’t use the same words.

Secondly, for some reason, without even that fact alone, even now that Valkryn is considered dead (of course he would probably consider himself dead if he is battling Lolth in the Deamonweb Pits), I honestly don’t think that Gia would do a thing to me. I think if I had stayed within the confines of Navere with Visus, that he would never have been taken, truly, from me to begin with. Yes, he would have been weaned to know Lolth, not something I would have denied him despite the fact that I despise the elg’caress and so does his father.

As much as I would much prefer the priestesses of Navere to stay out of the boy’s life, which would be something I could have lived with if Thaydin could have agreed to it. I do see his point. Gia now has three children, and Visus is our first. He is going to be a very interesting little one to watch growing up, and we would much prefer to do such under our own power, and not necessary that which Gia would put him though. As we see it, she has already destroyed at least one child through neglect, another through pushing entirely too hard down a path that we are not certain the young woman wishes to go. Neither Valas nor Elora wishes much to do with House Navere now that they are almost old enough to come to their own conclusions.

Of course that doesn’t even start to touch the will of Drew. I honestly do not think that he could, in any reconnaissance of faith in his beloved Mystra, ever kill a soul that he thought had even the sprinkling of goodness in them. I don’t know how many arguments he and I have gotten in over the past few years concerning Gia’s “cuddliness”. Not that I would go so far as to say she needs to meet the sharp end of a blade with her heart, but she is far from cuddly. He even had the audacity to become a blood-doll to a local vampire and argued against doing what was necessary to kill her, and this is after, this vampire, R, tried to kill our sister Marquie on several occasions.

I swear, I’ll never understand the boy, though I can rest assured at night, that no matter how perturbed he might be with me, that I will never have to worry about waking with a blade in my back. If anyone I have reason to fear, it would be Marquie. I wouldn’t like to believe that she would be capable of doing such a thing, but she has told me on several occasions that she continues to have dreams in which I will find my death at the end of her sword. She, much like myself, has managed to lose just about everything she ever cared about with the death of her mate Zodiac, and of her “stepfather” Valkryn. With her, I can completely sympathize, and I would hardly blame her if her visions do actually come true. After my little stint of death, I’m already surprised it hasn’t occurred already. If any of my friends, she has the most reason to despise me. I defended Zodiac when she first met him, thinking that he could be good for her, and he betrayed her. I was to be a source of comfort for her, and I allowed her to believe me dead. I was her beacon of strength and I fell from my pedestal. As I said, if my life ended at her hands, I would absolutely deserve it, if only for being one of the biggest disappointments in her life.

Regardless, many things occurred not as they should have and I was dead, Iberra was pulled down ontop of itself, and my little family found an oasis of sorts to protect what is ours.

If this is what being dead is like, I would much prefer to live until the gods are no more, and my last breath must be ripped from my body on the sheer fact that, someone cannot possibly live to be that old.

Of course there is the irony of ironies that it was my addiction that caused my death. Through the droppleganger’s eyes, I watched my husband kill me in cold hatred. I’m not sure if he knows if I watched or not, but I for certain know he knows that I felt the cold satisfaction of destroying that fallacy that looked like me. How hard is it to imagine late at night in the deepest darkest death, to fantasize that it was actually me he wished to kill. It wouldn’t be difficult for me to think that he could despise how little I have gained him by becoming his wife. I strive daily not to be a burden to him, albeit a pleasant one, in his eyes, to not be something that would be better off dead. I am quite pleased to know that when he looks at me, all he sees is the spitfire little elf that he fell in love with, and not the rothe, and hell-spawn faerie he was raised to see me as. The day he forgets that, is the day that I can start counting the seconds I have left to live, if not by his hands, but by my own breaking heart.

Perhaps somewhere, deep down inside, I knew that those I knew in the Highlands of Scotland would think me dead. A part of me hoped that it would be so. Maybe, just maybe. It would have been easier to just walk away from what I have grown to know and love. It would be easier to forget it all as I had to in my insanity at the fall of NaVire and the dissolution of Camelot Reborn. I highly doubt that my spirit would be able to handle such a fallacy as being truth, despite how well I might be able to delude myself. How quick was it, after Drew miraculously managed to track me down through the planes, before I found myself sneaking back to the Highlands to look in on those I knew?

I have to be a complete idiot to allow such things as the strings of my heart to decide where my next steps will take me. That is the reason why my “death” has been so hard on me. I, once again, had been backed into a corner doing something I do not wish to do, all because it was the best thing to do for others. It is the reason why my affairs are not still within the Highlands. It is why Visus will grow up not quite understanding just what home is. Is that something even his mother understands?

Many times over the course of my life, I have said to others, “I don’t want the job” and I end up doing exactly that. I come to question my strength of mind when it comes to past that I do end up doing the job anyways. Then again it could be argued that such things are pushed upon me because I actually have the strength of mind to do it and it is somewhere in the stars for me to do so. Again I find myself in such a place as that. I have people looking up at me, a simple rothe, a silly stinking faerie that doesn’t have the presence of mind to own herself, let alone rule a people as a leader. I sit here wondering, if they are idiots, or if the biggest fool is myself in being unable to see what they can.
Then there are the times, I still sit and wonder why the gods even bother to grace me with life’s breath at all. They must know something that I just simply cannot fathom.