Outside facing the cathedral district was the administrative district where there is a lot of important building necessary for day to day operation of imperial governance. The big boulevard that lies right outside the gate and separated the two districts was busy with pedestrian and distinguished carriages carrying nobles, officials or other important personages.
I stepped out through the gate and take a step aside so I wouldn’t be in the way of anyone passing through. There was no bench or other resting places in the side of the road so I stepped to the streetlamp dotting the side of the road and leaned into it, pausing to think.
It was close to midnight but the light pouring out the street lamp and the gaggle of people coming home from their workplace chased out the gloom of the darkness. The cloak and the mask had changed my stature into a tall but thin man so there were no curious people taking note of me like how it usually is whenever I walked out of the cathedral district.
I could have waited until morning light before walking out, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend another hour inside the mansion. I felt that I just had to get out there or I would start to believe that mother was just in a restful sleep instead of sleeping eternally in final rest.
Mother had a lot of regrets and she had said she determined to let it pass and not try to fix it since it was already too late, but some she would let me choose what I do with it. And among them was her regret about the hero who ended the 25 years reign of the darkness 15 years ago.
It was said in the tale – or what passed as it in the form of story uttered by the storyteller and the song sung by the bard – that the hero with his band of allies had fought with the dark lord to end the reign of darkness that had drowned the world in suffering and terror. After a long journey and uncountable battle against the minion of darkness, the journey ended in the land of twilight.
There, they found the source of evil pouring out from the hole that led into the void of space. The source of evil was powering the dark lord and giving him power beyond the ken of sentient kind. And because the dark lord’s immeasurable power made him close to impossible to defeat, the hero and his allies had a long and harrowing final battle.
The end of the tale had various variations from tragedies to what people discussing it as romantic or idealistic, but basically it told the same thing. The hero fell in battle, be it from the burden of his power to his body, trickeries of the dark lord, or sacrifice to let his allies survive. The hero died and his allies come home in triumph bringing the good news and new hope to sentient kind.
Mother had a regret about it because she always thought that she was responsible for the final fate of the hero and why he couldn’t come back from the fight together with her. She lamented the fact that she wasn’t blessed with stronger strength in skill and firmer willpower because things would have changed from how it had gone before.
I also just found out that the name she always sighed out when she was thinking about the old-time was the hero’s name. I had only thought that because mother hated being tied together with father in the bond of matrimony and so when she sighed deeply over a name and look of deep reminiscence came over her, it was because it was the person she longed to be with.
It turned out that it was the hero’s name. Whenever the storyteller and the bard sung their song, they always called the hero with a different name. I had always thought that the reason that she wasn’t with the person she longed to be was that because he was just someone with a low status.
The saint and his childhood friend were separated when the saint went together with the hero in the journey to vanquish the dark lord. And when she came back in triumph, father used his status to coerce mom to be together with him and destroyed the person she longed to be with. That what my imagination composed from the clue I gad picked up over the years.
And then this came, my mother telling me things she wanted me to know on her death bed. Confiding in me of the secret she had kept silent over her life, and exhorted me to make a choice of what I wanted to do with it because she didn’t believe she had the right to make her own choice about it.
It’s sad to see – and knew – that the reason she never tried to change her lot in life and fight for herself was that because she was afraid. Afraid that she would make everything worse like she always thought it would since that was what passed as normality in her view.
She believed that she wouldn’t be able to fix anything and could only make things worse. She told me to listen and not interrupt her when she told me of things on her death bed, but the question kept popping up in my heart back then.
Where was a friend that would pull her up when she fell down? Where was the person that would tell mother and encourages her? Are those people not exist because father confined her to the vicinity of saint Avern cathedral and because he isolated her from whoever could help her?
My mother told me that the hero might yet live. She told me that the hero was sealed together with the dark lord, and she thought she could do something about it since she regretted letting the hero to be sealed together with it. She told me that I could use the miniature human statue to pry open the seal and separated the soul of the hero from the seal holding him and the abomination, or I could let the seal be.
She told me to think, rethink and made my own judgment before making a choice and do something about her regret regarding the hero. Because according to one of her traveling allies, the Sage, undoing the seal might have had catastrophic consequences.
I love mother, but I didn’t think she should have given me the responsibility to make this kind of choice. Because right over here, under the lamplight in the side of the street, I only thought about one thing. I would travel to the place the hero was sealed and let him out if only to spite on father and his friends.
