Diary ~
The pain is completely gone now, leaving only that scar. Shana says that once she gets back to full power she can try to erase the scar but it's unlikely that it will work. Oh well, not such a big loss. A warrior can't worry too much about her appearance, right? But Dart is infuriated by this, saying that if he sees Lloyd again he will kill him.
Father's been training me again. But not quite so harshly, just a few pointers, maybe a few sparring matches now and then. It's a bit of a relief to know that he won't criticize me again, or push me too hard. But at the same time I am so afraid that he will again. That feeling is unshakable and it's terrible. I don't think I'll ever be able to really relax.
But then again, do moms get days off?
Oh right. I'm getting off the topic again. There are a couple of important things that happened.
Rose really is the original Dragoon. She's given extensive proof. It's really amazing. But she won't tell me anything further than that.
Father's a Dragoon now. I can call him Father now. I'll explain why later.
We've ended the war. Finally, a peace between Basil and Sandora, a united Serdio! King Albert is now sole ruler of the kingdom of Serdio, but he's leaving the repairs of the country to his council for a while because he is coming with us.
Maybe I should start from the beginning. Yeah, it's usually best to start there.
Albert decided that the war couldn't keep going on. It's been happening for twenty years and it was time to end it. What better way to end it but to go directly to its source? We were going to invade Kazas, the Black City, the capital of Sandora.
Lavitz is resting in Seles. Oh yeah, he woke up for a while after we returned from Kazas. He thanked me for my help, thanked the others for bringing him here, thanked Father for bringing his mother, thanked Shana for helping to heal him. His gratitude is genuine and makes me feel warm. He didn't stay conscious for long but he made King Albert promise that we send letters updating our situation to him once in a while. He also promised that as soon as he was able he would return to Bale and help the council and the knights to restore calm to all of Serdio.
Wow, it's hard to write in this flickering firelight. Anyway, we got into Kazas all right; nobody gave us a second glance. Some drunk guy tried to hit on Shana but got hit by Dart.
We found a little boy that helped us. His name was Popo and he was the representative of some underground group trying to end the war. It broke my heart seeing him, only eight or nine years old and yet he knew so much about suffering and the war. He said that it didn't matter who won the war as long as the fighting stopped because his people in the slums were suffering. Dart promised that we would stop the war so Popo showed us a secret passageway into the Black Castle.
One of the researchers in the Castle, playing with different-colored fire, told us that in order to get to Emperor Doel, we needed to open the elevator, and for that we needed to find the red, blue, and yellow stones. So we split up into two groups. I traveled with Father and Shana.
We got the yellow stone from the commander of the Sandoran forces. I recognized him and he recognized Shana and I.
I entered first, nearly attacked him because he was the one who dragged Shana to Hellena Prison. But he spoke first.
"How did you get in here? Never mind. It doesn't matter anymore. I remember you. You were the woman in Seles. You managed to down quite a number of my troops." I remember feeling Father's approval.
"And you." He noticed Shana. "You are the girl from Seles."
"Why did you kidnap her?" I asked him.
He shook his head. "It is far too late for explanations." He put his hand on his sword heavily, sighed. "I had my orders; I had to carry them out. All I know is that I had very strict, very direct orders to get the girl from Seles. She reacted to a magical object that the emperor had given me so we knew it was her." He paused, spoke again before I could ask. "I know what you're here for. Take it." He held out the yellow stone.
"You are betraying your emperor?" Father asked.
"No. I am saving him. Bring him out of his madness, I implore you!"
We regrouped with Dart, Albert, and Rose by the elevator. They had the blue and red stones. After inserting them in the elevator we were taken to the top floor.
We had to fight Kongol to get to Doel. Kongol fought loyally. He truly cares for his emperor. And despite his strength, we defeated him. I could tell that Father is impressed by how much my skills have improved. I am glad.
Doel was…a Dragoon. The Violet Dragoon, elemental thunder.
I don't like describing the battles in a diary. What's to say? You either win or lose.
We won.
Doel spoke to Albert, apologizing, and telling him some things that he needed to know about Sandora. To the rest of us he said that he didn't know why Shana was kidnapped. He was receiving orders from Emperor Diaz through a messenger.
"Emperor Diaz is dead!" Rose yelled. "He died eleven thousand years ago!"
"I don't know that much about the Dragon Campaign, young lady, but I do know that I am getting my orders from Diaz, or at least someone who is remarkably like Diaz. I get my orders through a messenger, a Wingly named Lloyd."
Okay, so I was right. Lloyd is a traitor. He must have been Albert's counselor just so he could get the Moon Gem. Oh right, the Moon Gem is a spiritual gift passed through Albert's bloodline. It carries great magical power and Albert comes with us to get it back.
Diaz told us that Lloyd was heading for Tiberoa, another continent. As he died, the Dragoon Spirit tugged itself off and hovered in the air. It paused and jolted, shivering, as if it didn't know what to do.
Rose frowned, reaching out a hand to touch it gently. "Why is it just staying there?" She asked.
It pulled out of her grip and flew around my head once and once around Father's head.
"It can't decide between Claire and Haschel?" Shana wondered.
"That might be it." Rose replied. "Though it's very rare that Dragoon Spirits do that. It's either one master or not at all."
At that point I backed off. "Dragoon Spirit, power of the Violet Dragon, I don't deserve your power. Give it to my father. He will perform the job better than I possibly can."
The Dragoon Spirit bounced in the air and latched around my father's neck.
"Oh great, so now I'm the Violet Dragoon?"
Okay, here's the point of my entry. Well, one point anyway. I think I've resolved things with Father by the little talk. Shana couldn't sleep, wondering about what the commander and emperor had said about her. She started crying from the stress.
As I had so many times before, I sang her to sleep. The lullaby I had composed twenty years ago had always managed to ease her into sleep. Soon she was sleeping peacefully, and so was Dart, in his sleeping bag nearby.
"I always knew you would make a good mother." Father said from the doorway, and I walked a bit farther away with him so we wouldn't disturb the children. Children? They're adults!
"I love the both of them." I told him.
"Claire, why didn't you tell me that you were with child? Why did you run away?"
I was so surprised. Father actually didn't know why I ran away!
"Master, you always thought that my training was the most important thing in the world. But I never had a chance to fully grow up. I never got to play with my friends as a child, never got to pick flowers and sing songs, never got to fall in love. Training in the Rouge martial arts was the only thing in my world. I grew sick of it. And when the traveler came to Rouge, I was obsessed with what he could tell me, what he could teach me. So many things in the world that didn't have to do with fighting! We fell in love and when I realized I was pregnant, I knew that I couldn't stay. You would be so upset, and as soon as he reached the age, I knew you would train your grandson as well. I didn't want that to happen. I wanted to give him a chance to grow up, so I ran away."
Father sighed then. "Fighting was important to me. I was a master of the Rouge arts, one of the only masters. I wanted my daughter to be one too, to know that pride. I didn't know that you would hate it so. I never realized." He toyed with the Dragoon Spirit. "Tell me, Claire, why did you reject the Dragoon Spirit?"
"Because I see the others with their Spirits and I know that I can never be like them. I have to watch over them as a mother, and I can't share the Dragoon magic with them. Besides, I wouldn't be able to do the job properly anyway."
"Why do you think that?"
For some reason his remark made me angry. Twenty years of cooped up hatred and fear and anger spilled out. I remember jumping to my feet and yelling. "Why do YOU think, Master? Because of you! Ever since I started my training, at six years old, right up until I ran away at eighteen, all you've done was criticize me! Nothing I ever did was good enough for you! You found fault in everything I did! I lived with criticism all my life! I began to doubt myself! Always, every day, I was useless, careless, stupid. I began to think that I was. The only reason I'm not a screwed up mental breakdown psychiatry patient right now is because Zieg taught me that I wasn't. But criticism followed me. Even when I ran away, practiced by myself, I could still hear you accusing me of not doing things correctly, calling me useless."
My shouting had awoken Dart and Shana, and brought the others to curiosity.
Father sighed again. "I think I understand why you ran away now. And after you left, I began to realize how harsh I made your training."
"Once we began training, you weren't my father anymore. You told not to call you father, but to call you master."
"Yes. I guess I was trying to raise you too fast. You grew up too fast. I'm sorry, Claire."
I didn't know how to respond to that.
"I shouldn't have trained you so hard. In doing that, I guess I pushed you away, huh?" He pushed his hair back, readjusted his sweatband. "I'm sorry that you lost your father."
Well, that was surprising. He was apologizing, talking about it. It was what I had been waiting for, wasn't it? So I reached over and hugged him. "But now I've found my father again." I pulled back, twirled a strand of my long hair—dark like Father's—around my finger. "To be perfectly honest, you weren't the full reason I nearly became insane. It was also because of Ilana."
"She was one of my other students, wasn't she?"
"Yes. Remember that day, the day before I ran away? I was sparring with Ilana and you were watching. You were criticizing me again, saying that I was useless. I was so angry, but I could never yell back to you. So I took my anger out in my fighting. I punched Ilana in my rage, and she fell to the ground. Remember that?"
"Yes."
"You ran to her side, to see if she was okay. I was so upset. I killed her. And you started yelling at me again, so I ran. I was upset because you ran to her side immediately as soon as she was hurt. When I was hurt, you only stood to the side, screaming at me to get up. But when she was hurt you automatically ran to her."
Again Father was genuinely upset and sorry. "Claire, that was because I wanted to make you strong. I…I wasn't raising you properly. I'm sorry."
I held up a hand to keep him silenced. I had to keep talking. "That was part of it. Another part was that I killed her. I killed someone, Father. Never before did I do that. Sparring, defeating, seeing your opponent on the ground writhing in pain is so very different from seeing your opponent unmoving and limp on the ground. Dead.""Claire, Ilana survived that."
Surprise, again. "What?"
"Ilana didn't die. You didn't kill her. It was a powerful punch, and she was unconscious for maybe a little less than a week but she didn't die."
I remember that I sank down to a log in relief. "Oh thank the gods…all these years I thought I killed her." It was true. For twenty years I thought that I had killed one of my friends.
"No. She's safe. Got married to the carpenter's son, I think."
"Jod? She married that stupid lug?" I made a face and Father laughed and I laughed with him before I noticed everyone else. "What? Why are you all standing around? Shana, Dart, weren't you two asleep?"
"Uh…yeah, Mom. But then we heard yelling and we got up."
"The father-daughter relationship has been smoothed over?" That was Albert. "That's good. You only have one father, you know. My father was killed. Now I can't see him anymore and I regret that."
Dart started calling Father by different names now, sometimes Master, sometimes Haschel, sometimes Grandfather. I began to call him Father. Not Master anymore. It was an unusual change, but welcome. I had never seen Father so happy before.