It was at the Festival of Light that I first saw her - truly saw her, I mean. In Mahtanâs workshop I had seen her creations, had admired them from afar as a fellow craftsman, but the woman behind the works had remained elusive, mysterious, up until that moment. In the glow of the lanterns, she was the fire of the forges come alive. Warmth seemed to radiate from her, spreading to everyone around. She was my new centre of gravity, pulling me towards her. I asked her for a dance and lost myself in her smile.
I arrived home one day to find that he had grown taller than me. In countenance and bearing he looked so much like my father that my heart almost burst with pride.
Late at night I would stand in the garden, watching the stars with tears in my eyes as I listened to the soft strumming of his harp, wafting from the open window of his bedroom. Not in a thousand years could I create as much beauty through my craft as he does with a simple harp and the right melody.
He once spoke to me in the tongue of the ravens. I did not understand, so I asked him what he had meant to say. It was a tale of feathers and warm nests, of kicking and pecking your way into the world, and of trusting the air under your wings.
His world was one of possibilities. He saw the patterns in the way the world moves, and he wanted to change them, to interrupt the steady flow of history, to leave his mark upon it. When the rain washed away the fortress he had built out of mud and twigs, he resented it. The next time he used stone and iron. The city he built, stood in our garden for a whole year.
I taught him my craft, as I as a young man had been taught it, and his first thought was to try and improve upon it. I expected nothing less. He was too much like me; proud, ambitious, brilliant - and yet living in the shadow of what I had done before him, what everyone expected of him. Other people looked at him, and they only saw me. But he had his motherâs smile. It would light up his face whenever he completed an intricate engraving, whenever he cut a gemstone just right, whenever I gave him a nod of approval.
They once made their own language, one that only the two of them could understand. Intricate and melodious, oddly complex. I could have figured it out, of course, but some things are better left alone.
I never wanted any of them to die for me.
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