Inheritance
By Virodeil
AU. Murtagh was saved from the Twins before his hell-on-earth ever began, but by whom and for what purpose? Nobody would guess…
Note on human to elf aging standard, Rey-verse: (elf, then human)
1 = 1
5 = 2
10 = 5
15 = 6-7
20 = 7-8
30 = 10-11
50 = 15
70 = 16
100 = 17-18
300 = 20-21
500 = 25-30
(Please note: The human age comparison is more about the standard, rather than exact age, and here the modern standard is used.)
Chapter Notes: Thank you for Ruon Jian for pointing this matter: In Rey-verse, a human Dragon Rider ages far slower than an ordinary human, especially the younger he or she is when firstly becoming a Rider. (So, say, one who becomes a Rider at the acceptable age of 10 has different growth and development to one who becomes a Rider at the age of 15 or 8.) An elf looks at years differently than a human too, so 30 years to an elf or other long-lived beings are not the same as the same number for a human. Please pardon the confusion in this chapter and maybe the next ones.
Chapter 4: Innocence
From a not-so-large sheet of rectangle, shiny, cool-to-the-touch metal, a small child stares at me with gently-laughing eyes. The said child is seated comfortably in the lap of somebody who cannot be seen on the all-too-lifelike picture, hugging a wooden tub which covers the front of the tiny, slim body from lap to shoulders with arms and legs. From the look alone, I cannot ascertain whether the child is a she or a he, neither the age.
But I cannot forget the eyes.
Like everything in the picture, far more lifelike than most of the drawings and tapestries I have ever seen in the palace, the eyes are done perfectly to the smallest detail.
Too perfectly.
The left large and black, the right small and blue.
But those eyes never laughed, in all my memory; neither at me, nor especially with me.
But the child, he looks so content, so at peace, so gleeful even, though in a much more muted sort of way than the looks I was used to see in or around the palace, or during my travels.
Here, he looks vulnerable, childlike, even if he were not hugging a tub of something all to himself and licking something from the tips of his left fingers, even if he were not so cosily seated in somebody's lap, a feat I never acquited with him, even if he did not look so happy in his own way.
If I met this child, to be honest to myself, I would have at least smiled at him, sharing the laughter trapped in those shining mismatched eyes, which in this picture looks out at the world earnestly, unjudgingly, innocently. Oh, he looks less open than other children I ever encountered before, and those eyes seem to have seen too much sorrow and burden for one looking so young, but still.
I raise a hand, aiming a finger at the not-so-lean, not-so-high cheek, but then hesitate; not because I am worried of besmirching the picture, no, but because, somehow, I am afraid of his wrath.
Twenty years old, and still afraid, very much afraid.
The eyes were listless, nearly lifeless, clouded with hysteria and desperation, the last time I saw him alive, before he departed home and never returned. Before that, he had rarely looked at me too, and each occasion had always made me think that he was displeased to be in the same room with me, despite other signs.
The flash in those eyes never signified humour like the child in here, the child whom I would never connect to the father I knew were it not for his black hair, general look, mismatched black-and-blue eyes, the stub of the right pointer finger displayed for all the world to see as the child's right arm winds round a third of the tub, and the pair of toeless, misshapen feet similarly propped at either side of it. The flash, though it rarely happened while I was interacting with him, and always when he was deeply drunk, was always accompanied by snarls and biting remarks on my person.
Once, it even accompanied a searing pain across my back, the wound of which I carry until now.
So – "How?"
I blink.
I never meant to say that aloud.
And why is my voice croaking? These two days, as the seven of us are travelling deeper and deeper into a forest, the Guarding Forest in fact according to my strange, fussy, all-too-loving escorts, I was always coaxed into conversations, usually done in what the said escorts have termed "the old tongue," of which I surprisingly know a decent amount from childhood. So why?
My finger trembles, but at last descends on its target, slightly altered from the one before, shakily touching the tiny, fragile-looking right hand placed flat against the dark-brown surface of the wooden container. A lump forms in my throat, and faintly I notice that my breathing has gone a little more ragged. But why?
I look away from the picture, retract my hand, curl up into a ball, stare out into the greenish gloom of the nearly-nonexistent path before us. My eyes feel hot, heavy, wet; but why do I mourn? For whom? I was never this sentimental before, not even when I was imprisoned only because of my blood, not even when I was left alone in the prison for a long time, not even when I was abandoned once more in the nonexistent mercy of those purple-robed slimeballs. My relation with Ré'a also could not be termed as father-son relationship, usually, as he more often than not used me like a child would to a doll or stuffed animal when he was home, rarely saying anything to me otherwise, let alone praising me.
From all round me, my escorts stir uneasily, and gloom settles into all of us, though indeed nobody spoke even before Yaela the motherly handed me the picture, also silently. I ignore it; even if I had a choice in it, I would ignore it, ignore them. They bring this unease and gloom into themselves; I did not ask for any picture, did not ask for any story.
I never wished for the maelstrom of emotions to trap me like this, that is why. I… I…
"This fairth was taken when he was twenty years old," comes a soft whisper from my left at length, from the same person who started this all. If I could unwind my hands from each other's clutch to stopper my ears, I would. I do not wish to hear about anything right now, especially about that, about him, about the past in which I was not included, in the past where he was another person entirely, the past whose future might see me eliminated by sheer impossibility.
"Much happened to him," she continues in the same soft tone, regardless of my internal wishes, maybe regardless of her own wishes as well as I detect a slight undercurrent of pain and reluctance in her voice. "But forty years later, he was still similar to the child you saw sitting on Evandar's lap just now, as we managed to shelter him from some of the worst this cruel world offered."
Sixty years. Sixty years of that bliss, never granted onto me. But the leap of fate: Would I endure such if I knew where it would lead in sixty years time? And to make those years all naught but ashes in the wind, laughable in its shortness compared to the more than eighty-odd years spent in the torment I could always see in his eyes, leaving just the man that I knew, what happened? I – no, I shall not pity him! But…?
I shudder.
Hysteria bubbles up in me: confusing, heart-aching, but forceful and inexorable.
But why? Why do I care? Why now?
"But some time after he was kidnapped right from his bed in Ilirea, he returned to us, far changed. We mourned him; we mourn, until now."
The child with gently-laughing eyes, licking something from his fingers with relish, hugging a tub half his size and nearly drowning in it, looking at the world earnestly, unjudgingly, innocently.
He is no more. He was no more, from quite a long time ago, from something that I now begin to belatedly perceive as not of his doing, maybe from tortures that might have far eclipse mine in the hand of those slimeballs.
The child with mismatched eyes and stubby finger and misshapen feet, sitting contentedly uncaring about anything but the tub in his current possession, and maybe his living 'throne' as well.
I never met him, only the husk that had used to be him.
The child with gently-laughing eyes, staring at me, like he never did in my life.
Only a picture.
But the arms, the fragile and tiny ones grown large and hard and strong by war and hardships, they still did it, what the little one does in that picture to his beloved tub of most likely sticky treasure of the honey persuasion, the treasure introduced to me early in my childhood by the same fingers. They did it to me, whenever he was home and was not drinking himself to a stupor or a rage.
No, not a picture, not only a picture, in some tiny part, and I never realised it, what a treasure it was, until it was gone.
The elves are wrong, they are wrong, on one tiny account.
I was like a doll, but his doll. No more laughing eyes, no more carefree look, but the arms were still there, the fingers were still there.
And then, everything was ruined, again, with nobody knowing it.
And now, both versions are far out of reach; everything is far too late, all unappreciated.
He is gone, truly gone.
And with that, the dam in my eyes breaks at last.
End notes: Events in Inheritance made this all-too-sappy author believe that Murtagh never got the chance or inclination or both to properly mourn his parents - his mother, let alone his father. Make of this chapter as you wish…