Pain|Love|Blood

We don’t do this for joy.

That’s what I’m left to think, after watching Lan commune with the House Spirits of his grandfather’s farm, begging that they both be new and separate from each other. I think it was easy to come to this ‘haunted’ place and say it is a place of grief, fixed into retrospective sorrow, but that wouldn’t be right. There was no grief here until they mourned what could not be. Grief set this place free.

Blood of my family, blood of my land, flow apart and be free. Be free. By Desna’s grace be free.

I feel in my bones that I have no love nor hate for Nidal. It is simply foreign to me; I have not the language to describe what insane bravery it must have taken to flee that place with a king’s ransom of horses and devote them to a war with apocalyptic stakes. I think a less wise person would have expected them to flee to some other corner of the world, or to keep moving, to flee from pain, to seek joy only.

Maybe pain binds us together, in a way. Like blood.

Thoughts to scare Grandfather, certainly.

We left people behind, Silas said. How many whipped and punished because we fled? How many made into grist for their blood and pain? How many dark horses on the road led astray by the goddess? How long until one slips through the night?

Are you one of them, Silas?

If you are, I don’t know if it’s worse to know or not know.