One of his earliest memories was of his mother braiding his hair. She would work her fingers though the knots, straightening out what she could and ignoring the rest. It was a difficult task with hair like his: hair that stuck out at every angle and refused to be tamed. Most days she considered herself lucky if she could tease out a single braid.
"What a mess. You didn't get this from me," she'd say as she worked. He twisted around, tried to see her face, and she was almost always smiling.
He also remembered watching her climb the impossibly tall trees that surrounded the village like sentinels. She moved confidently amongst the leaves, leaping from one branch to the other without hesitation.
"One day I will teach you," she promised him, "when you're much bigger."
But he tried to climb them anyway, without her permission and without her guidance. He remembers Kanen'tó:kon watching him from below, begging for him to come back down before he hurt himself.
"Be careful!" his friend cried only moments before he lost his grip on a particularly smooth branch and fell to the pine needles and leaf mold below. He landed hard on his arm and felt a sharp pain envelope his entire body.
His mother, of course, was furious. "So reckless," he heard her say that night while he was pretending to sleep. "Like your father."
He remembered that she seldom spoke of his father. That she often avoided the topic at all costs. He has few memories of those rare moments when she'd bring him up - whether it was a passing mention or a brief description of the man. At the time all he had was a name and a term: Templar. But what was a Templar?
"When can I see my father?" he would ask. "Who is he? What is he like?"
"It doesn't matter," was all his mother would say. And she would leave it at that.
He was young, but he could still see that it all mattered very much.
He was beginning to forget the sound of her voice. This troubled him, because he thought for so long that he'd committed it to memory: the way she spoke, the softness of her tone as she was putting him to bed each night, the determined hardness even when she was clearly upset. For the longest time he'd drawn strength from it, but now it was fading with the years, lost in an abundance of new memories, of new people and new voices.
In time he found that he couldn't remember many of the other small things about her: the stories she would tell him before he went to sleep, the way she looked when she sat beside him at the nighttime fires, the scent of her when she pulled him to a motherly embrace, the warmth in her eyes when she told him that she loved him.
These memories, like many things, began to drift away, slipping through his fingers like a thin mist.
But there was one final memory that couldn't forget, even if he wanted to. He remembered the day when the smoke of his burning village stung his eyes, when he came so close to the flames that he could feel them lick against the bare skin of his arms. He remembered the roughness of the logs against his fingers as he tried to move them away from his mother's trapped body. He remembered the mingling smells of burning wood, of burning skin and human hair. He remembered her expression, the touch of her bloodied hands against his, her words: Always and forever.
Always and forever. He carried them with him, close to his heart, always in the back of his mind.