Ghosts

The thing about traveling alone is that most often, you find yourself traveling with the ghosts of events and people past. Sometimes those memories are ones you wish to relive, bringing you joy in the darkness of lonesome travel, but most times, the ghosts that hover near as you travel through dark thickets and hazardous ground are the ones you wish to bury, the memories that drag people and memories from graves that should have never been touched once they were laid to rest. But that does not stop them from coming, from draining the happiness, the courage, the nobility from everything. As I left Yllvalion and stepped into the cold winter air outside the gates, the ghosts that haunted me were of people I had no right to forget, but I had slowly begun to as my centuries wore on.
 
Leaving Yllvalion to meet Reinys in Stronghold was the first time I had left the walls surrounding the city in over two centuries. My master knew why I was weary to leave, but she knew that it was time I faced the ghosts and faced the reality of the visions that haunted me.Lady Naya spoke of how rune mages only had one thing that could protect them. The mind of the rune mage was our greatest weapon, it could not be darkened by ghosts and shadows in far corners. So at her plea, I took the steps outside of the walls, waiting for the ghosts to come to me.
 
Days passed quietly as I padded through the snow. Once I made it closer to the capital, I could find a mount or some other way to reach Stronghold, but for now, I was alone with Kigiria and the ghosts of my parents. I had not thought of them in years, somehow relegating their memory to the corners of my mind that held visions of the devastation that the Eldritch War had wrought. Their ghosts brought memories of my past, ones that I had hidden and buried when Lady Naya had found me. But the loneliness and the silence brought them back, and the confidence I had in my abilities and myself dwindled.
 
My parents had died during the war, a bloody battle that had claimed many lives. Father was a paladin, a man of great talents that had stood close to Master Elduin on the battlefield. Mother was a huntress, lending her talents to the battle where needed. Their abilities and early teachings had discovered my aptitude for magic, but their tutelage was short-lived. My parents met their end on a battlefield mere miles from the gates that I had walked out of. I had seen the wreckage, had hugged their bodies as they cooled in the snow. When I left that field with their blood still on my clothes, I was no longer the daughter of a Knight or the daughter of a huntress, I was a lost orphan, and that is how I chose to stay.
 
I had wandered the streets of Yllvalion aimlessly, for days or years I still do not know. At some point, Lady Naya called my name, leading me from my half existence to a life that would have made my parents proud. But now guilt settled in. Why had I forgotten them so easily? Why had I not followed the lives that my parents had lived? I had survived the cataclysm that happened outside the gates of my home, but had I really survived the ghosts that haunted me?