Eleeria Silverwing

Stress

I went home and buried myself in the mundane routine of the Blood Knights. Paperwork, training, repeat. Letting people fold me into a routine, dictate my schedule. I have never been particularly keen on living by someone else’s rules -- but in the end I find it easiest to forget my emotions when I don’t have time to contemplate them. So I bury myself. Let them replace Eleeria with some well-mannered soldier, as I have done in the past so well and so fluidly; it eases the ache, the paranoia. My food journal starts to fill again: from nothing to a few things, and finally to real meals. I am not ready to talk about my feelings, so I cook them instead: stew, pasta, meats and pies all come tumbling out of my kitchen and in turn, into my mouth and the mouths of the people who I live and work with. Shanks, Ethalarian -- a random woman who had said she had some large craving for a particular recipe for lynx in the halls of blood. The list goes on and yet -- I am unfulfilled. It’s just emptiness; all these recipes and all these ingredients spill from a hole in me that I can’t fix.

In the end, we are all Ahral.

I can’t stop thinking of it -- every knead of the dough in my hands becomes a punch directed at my own swirl of emotions. In the end, every single one of us acted like the man we hated -- or at best, were indifferent to. We played his rules, ran his gamut; there is no difference between us, after all. Perhaps that was the bitterest irony of them all. For all of our preaching that we were different, in the end, we all meekly bowed to a sick man’s whim and why? For what? If we truly knew what power was, couldn’t we stop this cycle? Or have we all learned not to be powerful, but to bend to someone’s will in a way that seems like power? I’m inclined to think it’s more the latter -- in the end we are not free, neither to do what is best nor to change. Instead we’re shackled to this illusion of being powerful. In the end we’re just pieces on a chess board in the hands of people who care little for what we want. A queen on the board is still a pawn in the hands of the player; no matter the seniority of the piece in your hands, it’s still a piece. And all pieces are disposable.

Save one. Long live the king.

(But who, in this stupid metaphor, is the king?)

I overknead the dough and the bread comes out compacted and strange. It takes me two more tries to make another loaf that I can eat.

Balthori asked for my help to save Tellarian. Synthiel didn’t ask, but I knew what she wanted -- why were we bothering to play at kings when the result was so defeatist? She would have been satisfied to walk away and not look back, but I think if she were here she would have been satisfied to see someone throw the middle finger in Ahral’s face too; she had no love of his troops. I keep thinking of what I threw at Vensala -- if they don’t follow our orders, then they’re not our people. I still hold by that. I feel as if I was thrown these platitudes and yet, know nothing more than I did before. In the end, I still know nothing. In the end, I am just as useless as I was a few months ago.

And I hate it. There is nothing more frustrating to me than to know I am powerless and have no ability to change it.

So I pour my feelings into cooking. There is nothing to be done; there is nothing to do, and the only step I can take at this point is to actively decry how terrible the slaughter will be is to simply do nothing at all, or so it seems.

And I hate it so much.

The piles of food grow. I can’t eat all of this -- I can’t even really give all of this away. I can try, I suppose. But at the end of the day as I push it into the hands of strangers and urchins alike, nothing fills the hole. If anything, the gap gets wider. Did they ever truly mean it? That they would be different? Or was I simply lied to, again and again, complicit in digging my own grave?

(Why are we following the words of an old and dying man whose life will still be gone -- to make our own continuing lives miserable? Do we fear the specters of our past so much that we hide from them in the future? In the communal Black Dawn dance of death, as Ahral the one who binds us to the chopping block? Or are we all so scared of change that we meekly follow along as sheep to slaughter?)

I throw one of my kitchen knives across the room -- it sticks in the wall, the sound of metal piercing drywall resounding with a sudden thud. I stare at it -- the knife, the damage -- and feel if I could simply pierce the issue here with the same decisiveness that I might be able to save Tellarian. Everyone wants control of the city, but everyone comes at it from the same hyper-aggressive view. Everyone thinks that they can break it; what if we just...play the power shift? The people who live there hate everyone from outside. But the people who live there hate everyone inside Tellarian too. Nobles hate other nobles, who all communally hate the poor, who hate anyone who has it better off than them. If we could just pick a side and play the cards, quell the dissent between classes by inserting our own manpower...strike a deal. That is what I would do, anyway. What I want to do.

It’s pointless to even ask to try, I think. After all, everyone else is keen to mutely follow along.

I write the note to Hyrall anyway. Before we burn it, I want to try one last thing in Tellarian.

(He probably won’t acknowledge it -- he reminds me of that old hag, a little bit, in things like that. But no one can blame me for trying. They left me alone in the hole they helped me dig and I will crawl back out of it come hell or high water.)

Saving my kitchen wall from any more indignity, and my wallet from purchasing more ingredients, I grab my daggers and head to the training yard. There, I can throw in peace; I take up a stance and feel the weight of steel in my hands and let my muscles burn.

All these thoughts flying through my head -- I sent one of those numerous cakes to Lilliana as well, coffee rum cake. Sorry. It was all I could think to put on the note; what other words do I have? I am ambitious to my bones and yet -- my father is an ambitious man too, and I have watched him walk his path. I watched him chase my mother away. I watched him every time he took a finger from me; I screamed as the brands hit my skin and I vowed with every breath after never to be like him. If I do not want to turn into Vanaal then I need to accept that everything I want cannot be everything I receive. I want the Silent Legion -- but I know that I am no...Lilliana. Who would ever compare us?

(For the first time, I allow myself to think negatively -- scrawny, hungry thing I am. Too small, too thin, too angular. Eyes full of questions never able to be answered, burning with fire for a world in which I right the wrongs I see, in which I can use the power I wield to some effectiveness. I want to be queen -- not because of any wanting, necessarily. But because I have lived in the gutter and the lofted halls too, and I can tell you the secret that no one wants you to know -- they’re all full of absolute shit.)

I am not particularly sorry about the words, however. But she doesn’t need to know that.

Baby steps.

I draw my bow and aim it at the target next; a flash of light and the arrows materialize at my fingertips. I do want Tellarian. I can’t explain it other than -- I feel I owe it to my friends. I’ve never felt that way before, really, but I do now: I owe it to Synthiel and to Balthori as well to at least try. Besides, standing by has never been the way I’ve worked -- I don’t want to be the footnote in history. I want to be the history.

Maybe I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way. If I have to pick -- blood knight or assassin, light or shadow, ranger or mage -- then I choose neither. I don’t want to be defined by a specific title. The combination of the arcane and the light in my hands feels correct, it feels -- like something has finally clicked for me. The structure of the magics combine to create weapons and ammunition, then fired from my bow, or used like a sword or a dagger. I don’t need to be just a blood knight; I don’t need to be anything but Eleeria Silverwing. Maybe all these years I’ve spent following my father, following some other person, have all been a mistake. I think maybe I’m ready to just...be myself. Whoever the fuck that is.

My next shots hit the target square in the bullseye, one after the other. Clockwork. I’ve gotten fairly good at this, archery. The past few years have been good for me, I think. That can be part one of the Eleeria puzzle -- I’m good with weapons. I learn them relatively quickly, and I practice hard at everything that doesn’t make sense until the motions flow seamlessly. A few more shots, this time as I’m moving. I remember the precision shots that flew from the top of the crucible into the Akenashi’s side -- avoiding Morylina, landing exactly where I wanted them to, even as the two of them wrestled in the dirt. I could be good at this.

Maybe...we could just start here. Baby steps, into a future Eleeria who isn’t so scared of the past.

I take out a piece of paper and write to Linnea.

Another piece to Siildore.

A final note, attached with the “Sorry,” to Lilliana. I still want to be friends, whatever that means to you. I support you.

I will not become what I hate.

--

The dream has changed.

In my dreams, we are dancing -- it’s the midsummer fire festival, and I am surrounded by the people I love. I dance with Lilliana, to a tempo slightly faster than the beat of the music -- we are laughing and breathless by the end. Siildore follows the beat exactly, leaving me time to sneak in kisses to her jawline, and finally her lips at the music’s end.

Linnea...holds me close. I’m sorry. The words pass between us as a breath -- and I wake--

And the ghosts don’t haunt me. If only for a day.