So many times have I pondered the long road I have walked, and likely will still walk. I hear Innovindil’s words often, her warning that a long-lived elf must learn to live her life to accommodate the mortality of those she may come to know and love. And so, when a human passes on, but the elven lover remains, it is time to move on, time to break emotionally and completely and begin anew.
I have found this a difficult proposition, indeed, and something I cannot easily resolve. In my head, Innovindil’s words ring with truth. In my heart . . .
I do not know.
As unconvinced as I am about this unending cycle, it occurs to me that measuring the life span of a human as a guideline is also a fool’s errand, for indeed, do not these shorter-lived races live their lives in bursts, in fits and starts, abrupt endings and moments of renewal? Childhood friends, parted for mere months, may reunite only to discover that their bonds have frayed. Perhaps one has entered young adulthood, while the other remains in the thrall of childhood joys. Many times did I witness this in Ten Towns (though surely it was less frequent among the more regimented lives of Bruenor’s kin in Mithral Hall), where a pair of boys, the best of friends, would turn corners away from each other, one pursuing a young lady who intrigued him in ways he could not have previously imagined, the other holding fast to childish games and less complicated joys.
On many occasions, this parting proved more than a temporary split, for never again would the two see each other in the previous light of friendship. Never again.
Nor is this limited to the transition of childhood to young adulthood. Far from it! It is a reality we all rarely seem to anticipate. Friends find different roads, vowing to meet again, and many times—nay, most times!—is that vow unrealized. When Wulfgar left us in Mithral Hall, Bruenor swore to visit him in Icewind Dale, and yet, alas, such a reunion never came to pass.
And when Regis and I did venture north of the Spine of the World to visit Wulfgar, we found for our efforts a night, a single night, of reminiscing. One night where we three sat about a fire in a cave Wulfgar had taken as his home, speaking of our respective roads and recalling adventures we had long ago shared.
I have heard that such reunions can prove quite unpleasant and full of awkward silence, and fortunately, that was not the case that night in Icewind Dale. We laughed and resolved that our friendship would never end. We prodded Wulfgar to open up his heart to us, and he did, recounting the tale of his journey back to the north from Mithral Hall, when he had returned his adoptive daughter to her true mother. Indeed, in that case, the years we had spent apart seemed to melt away, and we were three friends uninterrupted, breaking bread and sharing tales of great adventure.
And still, it was but one single night, and when I awoke in the morn, to find that Wulfgar had prepared a breakfast, we two knew that our time together had come to an end. There was no more to say, no stories left which hadn’t been told. He had his life now, in Icewind Dale, while the road for me and Regis was back to Luskan, and to Mithral Hall beyond that. For all the love between us, for all the shared experiences, for all the vows that we would meet again, we had reached the end of our lives together. And so we parted, and in that last hug, Wulfgar had promised Regis that he would find him on the banks of Maer Dualdon one day, and would even sneak up and bait the hook of his fishing pole!
But of course, that never happened, because while Innovindil advised me, as a long-lived elf, to break my life into the shorter life spans of those humans I would know, so too do humans live their lives in segments. Best friends today vow to be best friends when they meet again in five years, but alas, in five years, they are often strangers. In a few years, which seems not a long stretch of time, they have often made for themselves new lives with new friends, and perhaps even new families. This is the way of things, though few can accurately anticipate it and fewer still will admit it.
The Companions of the Hall, the four dear friends I came to know in Icewind Dale, sometimes told me of their lives before. Wulfgar and Catti-brie were barely adults when I came into their lives, but Bruenor was an old dwarf even then, with adventures that had spanned centuries and half the world, and Regis had lived for decades in exotic southern cities, with as many wild adventures behind him as those yet to come.
Bruenor spoke to me often about his clan and Mithral Hall, as dwarfs are wont to do, while Regis, with more to hide, likely, remained cryptic of his earlier days (days that had set Artemis Entreri on his trail, after all!). But even with the exhaustive stories Bruenor told to me, of his father and grandfather, of the adventures he had known in the tunnels about Mithral Hall, of the founding of Clan Battlehammer in Icewind Dale, it rarely occurred to me that he had once known friends as important to him as I had become.
Or had he? Isn’t that the mystery and the crux of Innovindil’s claims, when all is stripped bare? Can I know another friend to match the bond I shared with Bruenor? Can I know another love to match that which I found in Catti-brie’s arms?
What of Catti-brie’s life before I met her on the windswept slope on Kelvin’s Cairn, or before she had come to be adopted by Bruenor? How well had she known her parents, truly? How deeply had she loved them? She spoke of them only rarely, but that was because she simply could not remember. She had been but a child, after all . . .
And so I find myself in another of the side valleys running alongside Innovindil’s proposed road: that of memory. A child’s feelings for her mother or father cannot be questioned. To look at the child’s eyes as she stares at one of her parents is to see true and deep love. Catti-brie’s eyes shone like that for her parents, no doubt.
Yet she could not tell me of her birth parents, for she could not remember!
She and I spoke of having children of our own, and oh, but I wish that had come to pass! For Catti-brie, though, there hovered about her the black wings of a great fear, that she would die before her child, our child, was old enough to remember her, that her child’s life would parallel her own in that one, terrible way. For though she rarely spoke of it, and though she had known a good life under the watchful gaze of benevolent Bruenor, the loss of her parents—even parents she could not remember—forever weighed heavily upon Catti-brie. She felt as if a part of her life had been stolen from her, and cursed her inability to remember in greater detail more profoundly than the joy she found in recalling the smallest bits of that life lost.
Deep are those valleys beside Innovindil’s road.
Given these truths, given that Catti-brie could not even remember two she had loved so instinctively and wholly, given the satisfied face of Wulfgar when Regis and I found him upon the tundra of Icewind Dale, given the broken promises of finding old friends once more or the awkward conversations which typically rule such reunions, why, then, am I so resistant to the advice of my lost elven friend?
I do not know.
Perhaps it is because I found something so far beyond the normal joining one might know, a true love, a partner in heart and soul, in thought and desire.
Perhaps I have not yet found another to meet that standard, and so I fear it cannot ever be so again.
Perhaps I am simply fooling myself—whether wrought of guilt or sadness or frustrated rage, I amplify and elevate in my memory that which I had to a pedestal that no other can begin to scale.
It is the last of these possibilities which terrifies me, for such a deception would unravel the very truths upon which I stand, the very hopes that lift me from my bed each morning, the very memories which carry me through each day. I have felt this sensation of love so keenly—to learn that there were no gods or goddesses, no greater design to all that is beyond that which I already know, no life after death, even, would pain me less, I believe, than to learn that there is no lasting love.
And thus do I deny the clear truth of Innovindil’s advice, because in this one instance, I choose to let that which is in my heart overrule that which is in my head.
For I have come to know that to do otherwise, for Drizzt Do’Urden, would be to walk a barren road.
* * *
The world moves along outside the purview or influence of my personal experience. To return to Icewind Dale is to learn that the place has continued, with new people replacing those who are gone, through immigration and emigration, birth and death. Some are descendants of those who lived here before, but in this transient place of those who flee the boundaries of society, many, many more are those who have come here anew from other lands.
Similarly, new buildings have arisen, while others have fallen. New boats replace those which have been surrendered to the three great lakes of the area.
There is a reason and logic to the place and a wondrous symmetry. In Icewind Dale, it all makes sense. The population of Ten Towns grows and shrinks, but mostly remains stable to that which the region can support.
This is an important concept in the valuation of the self, for far too many people seem oblivious to the implications of this most basic truth: the world continues outside of their personal experience. Oh, perhaps they do not consciously express such a doubt of this obvious truth, but I have met more than one who has postulated that this existence is a dream—his dream and the rest of us, therefore, are mere components within the reality of his creation. Indeed, I have met many who act that way, whether they have thought it out to that level of detail or not.
I speak, of course, of empathy, or in the cases stated, of the lack thereof. We are in constant struggle, the self and the community, where in our hearts we need to decide where one line ends and another begins. For some, this is a matter of religion, the unquestioned edicts of a professed god, but for most, I would hope, it is a realization of the basic truth that the community, the society, is a needed component in the preservation of the self, both materially and spiritually.
I have considered this many times before, and professed my belief in community, and indeed, it was just that belief that stood me up again when I was beaten down with grief, when I led my newfound companions out of Neverwinter to serve the greater good of a worthy place called Port Llast. This, to me, is not a difficult choice; to serve the community is to serve the self. Even Artemis Entreri, that most cynical of creatures, could hardly disguise the sense of satisfaction he felt when we pushed the Sahuagin sea devils back under the surf for the good of the goodly folk of Port Llast.
As I consider my own roots and the various cultures through which I have passed, however, there is a more complicated question regarding this equation: What is the role of the community to the self? And what of the smaller communities within the larger? What are their roles, or their responsibilities?
Surely common defense is paramount to the whole, but the very idea of community needs to go deeper than that. What farming community would survive if the children were not taught the ways of the fields and cattle? What dwarven homeland would thrive through the centuries if the dwarflings were not tutored in the ways of stone and metal? What elven clan could dance in the forest for centuries untold if not for the training given the children, the ways of the stars and the winds?
And there remain many tasks too large for any one man, or woman, or family, critical to the prosperity and security of any town or city. No one man could build the wall about Luskan, or the docks of Baldur’s Gate, or the great archways and wide boulevards of Waterdeep, or the soaring cathedrals of Silverymoon. No one church, either, and so these smaller groupings within the larger societies need contribute, for the good of all, whether citizens of their particular flock or group, or not.
But what then of the concentration of power which might accompany the improvements and the hierarchical regimentation that may result within any given community? In singular societies, such as a dwarven clan, this is settled through the bloodlines and proper heirs, but in a great city of mixed heritage and various cultures, the allocation of power is certainly less definitive. I have witnessed lords willing to allow their peasants to starve, while food rots in their own larders, for it is far too plentiful for their singular house to possibly consume. I have seen, as with Prisoner’s Carnival in Luskan, magistrates who use the law as a weapon for their own ends. And even in Waterdeep, whose lords are considered among the most beneficent in all the world, lavish palaces look down upon hovels and shanties, or orphaned children shivering in the street.
Once again, and to my surprise, I look to Ten Towns as my preferred example, for in this place, where the population remains fairly steady, if the individuals constantly change, there is logical and reasoned continuity. Here the ten communities remain distinct and choose among them their respective leaders through various means, and those leaders have voice at the common council.
The irony of Icewind Dale is that these communities, full of solitary folk (often numbering among their citizens many who fled the law or some gang, using Ten Towns as a last refuge), full of those who could not, supposedly, live among the civilized societies, are in truth among the most cooperative places I have ever known. The individual fishing boats on Maer Dualdon might vie fiercely for favored spots, but when the winter sets in, none in Ten Towns starve while others feast heartily. None in Ten Towns freeze in the empty street when there is room near a hearth—and there is always such room to be found. Likely it is the ferocity of the land, where all understand that numbers alone keep them safe from the yetis and the goblinkin and giantkind.
And that is the point of community: common need and common good, the strength of numbers, the tenderness of a helping hand, the ability to work as one to attain greater heights for all, the widening of horizons beyond one’s own perspective and one’s own family, the enrichment of life itself.
O, but there are many who would not agree with me, who view the responsibilities to the community, be it in tithe of food, wealth, or time, as too cumbersome or infringing upon their personal liberties . . . which I find too oft defined as personal desires and greed in the disguise of prettier words.
To them I can only insist that the ultimate loss exceeds the perceived gain. What good your gold if your neighbor will not lift you when you have fallen?
What length your memory, spoken in fondness, when you are gone?
Because in the end, that is the only measure, methinks. In the end, when life’s last flickers do fade, all that remains is memory, and richness then, in the final measure, is not weighed in gold coins, but in the number of people you have touched, the tears of those who will mourn your passing and who will continue to celebrate your life.
* * *
I could not have planned my journey. Not any particular journey to a town or a region, but the journey of my life, the road I’ve walked from my earliest days. I often hear people remark that they have no regrets about choices they’ve made because the results of those choices have made them who they are.
I can’t say that I agree fully with such sentiments, but I certainly understand them. And in that same reflection, I admit that hindsight is easy, but decisions made in the moment are often much more difficult, the “right” choice often much harder to discern.
Which circles me back to my original thought: I could not have planned out this journey I have taken, these decades of winding roads. Even on those occasions when I purposely strove in a determined direction, as when I walked out of Menzoberranzan, I could not begin to understand the long-term ramifications of my choice. Indeed on that occasion, I thought that I would likely meet my death, soon enough. It wasn’t a suicide choice, of course—never that!—but merely a decision that the long odds were worth the gamble when weighed against the certainty of life in Menzoberranzan (which seemed to me a form of emotional suicide).
Never did I think those first steps would lead me out of the Underdark to the surface world. And even when that course became evident, I could not have foreseen the journeys that lay ahead—the love of Montolio, and then the home and family I found in Icewind Dale. On that day I walked away from Menzoberranzan, the suggestion that my best friend would be a dwarf and I would marry a human would have elicited a perplexed and incredulous look indeed!
Imagine Drizzt Do’Urden of Daermon N’a’shezbaernon sitting at the right hand of King Bruenor Battlehammer of Mithral Hall, fighting beside King Bruenor against the raiding drow of Menzoberranzan! Preposterous!
But true.
This is life, an adventure too intricate, too interconnected to too many variables to be predictable. So many people try to outline and determine their path, rigidly unbending, and for them I have naught but a sigh of pity. They set the goal and chase it to the exclusion of all else. They see the mark of some imagined finish line and never glance left or right in their singular pursuit.
There is only one certain goal in life: death.
It is right and necessary and important to set goals and chase them. But to do so singularly, particularly regarding those roads which will take many months, even years, to accomplish is to miss the bigger point. It is the journey that is important, for it is the sum of all those journeys, planned or unexpected, which makes us who we are. If you see life as a journey to death, if you truly understand that ultimate goal, then it is the present which becomes most important, and when the present takes precedence above the future, you have truly learned to live.
One eye toward the future, one eye firmly rooted in the present journey, I say.
I have noted before and do so again—because it is a valuable lesson that should often be reinforced—that many who are faced with impending death, a disease that will likely take them in a year’s time, for example, quite often insist that their affliction is the best thing that ever happened to them. It took the immediacy of mortality to remind them to watch the sunrise and the sunset, to note the solitary flower among the rocks, to appreciate those loved ones around them, to taste their food and revel in the feel of a cool breeze.
To appreciate the journey is to live in the present, even as you aim for the future.
There are unintended consequences to be found, in any case. We do not usually choose to love those who become important to us. Oh, perhaps we choose our mate, but that is but one of a myriad of beloved we will know. We do not choose our parents or our siblings, but typically these people will become beloved to us. We do not choose our neighbors in our youth, and our city or kingdom is determined for us, initially at least. Few are those who break from that societal bond. I did, but only because of the extreme nature of Menzoberranzan. Had I been born and raised in Baldur’s Gate, and that city became involved in a war with Waterdeep, under whose flag would I fight? Almost assuredly the place of my birth, the place of my kin and kind. This would not be a neutral choice, and would be one, almost assuredly, influenced by past events large and small, by past emotional attachments of which I might not even be consciously aware. I would fight for my home, most of all, because it was my home!
And not one I had purposely chosen.
This is even truer regarding religion, I have found. For most people, at least. Children are typically raised within the guidelines of their family’s religion; this moral code becomes a part of their very identity, true to the core of who they are. And though the ultimate morality of most of the religions is identical, the particulars, whether in ritual or minor tenet, often are not. Even these seemingly minor discrepancies go to the heart of the tribal bonds of every sentient being, and few can step above their partisan outlook to evaluate a conflict at hand, should there be one, through the eyes of the opposing people.
These are journeys that we do not individually determine, full of beloved people we did not consciously choose to love. Familiarity may breed contempt, as the old saying goes, but in truth, familiarity breeds family and familial love, and that bond is powerful indeed. It would take extraordinary circumstances, I expect, for a brother to fight against a brother. And sadly, most wars are not waged over extraordinary moral quandaries or conflicting philosophies.
And so the bond will usually hold in the face of such conflict. To pass through childhood beside our siblings is to forge a special bond which those outside that family group cannot enter. A wise drow once told me that the surest way to rally citizens about their king is to threaten him, for even if those same citizens loathed the man, they would not loathe their homeland, and when such a threat is made, it is made upon that homeland most of all.
I find that such parochialism is true more often for humans and the shorter-living races than it is for elves, drow or surface, and for a very simple reason: rarely are elven children raised together. A child of the elven folk is more likely to have a sibling a century older than he is to have one passing through childhood beside him.
Our journeys are unique, but they are not in isolation. The roads of a thousand thousand individuals crisscross, and each intersection is a potential side street, a wayward path, a new adventure, an unexpected emotional bond.
Nay, I could not have planned this journey I have taken. For that, I am truly glad.
* * *
Is there any greater need within the social construct than that of trust? Is there any more important ingredient to friendship or to the integrity of a team?
And yet, throughout a person’s life, how many others might he meet in whom he can truly trust? The number is small, I fear. Yes, we will trust many others with superficial tasks and confidences at a certain level, but when we each dig down to emotions that entail true vulnerability, that number of honest confidants shrinks dramatically.
That has ever been the missing ingredient in my relationship with Dahlia, and in my companionship with Artemis Entreri. As I consider it now, I can only laugh at the reality that I trust Entreri more than Dahlia, but only in that I am trusting him with matters of mutual benefit. Were I in dire peril, would either rush to my aid?
I think they would if there was any hope of victory, but if their help meant true sacrifice, wherein either of them had to surrender his or her own life to save mine . . . well, I would surely perish.
Is it possible that I have grown so cynical and dark in my heart that I could accept that?
Who am I, then, and who might I become? I have forgotten that I have known friends who would push me out of the way of a speeding arrow, even if that meant catching the missile in their own body. So it was with the Companions of the Hall, all of us for each of us.
Even Regis. So often did we tease Regis, who was ever hiding in the shadows when battle was joined, but we knew with full confidence that our halfling friend would be there when the tide turned against us, and indeed, I have no doubt that my little friend would leap high to intercept the arrow before it reached my bosom at the willing price of his own life.
I cannot say the same of this second group with whom I adventured. Entreri would not give his life for me, nor would Dahlia, I expect (though in truth, with Dahlia I never know what to expect!). Afafrenfere the monk was capable of such loyalty, as was Ambergris the dwarf of Adbar, though whether I had earned that level of companionship with them or not I do not know. And Effron the twisted warlock? I cannot be certain, though I surely doubt that one who dabbles in arts so dark is a man of generous heart.
Perhaps with time, this second adventuring group would grow as close as the Companions of the Hall, and perhaps in that tightening bond there would come selfless acts of the highest courage.
But should I spend a hundred years beside them, might I ever expect the same level of sacrifice and valor that I had known with Bruenor, Catti-brie, Regis, and Wulfgar? In a desperate battle against seemingly unwinnable odds, could I move ahead to flank our common enemy with full confidence that when it came to blows, these others would be there beside me, all in to victory or death? That was what I knew would happen with the Companions of the Hall, but with my newfound “friends”?
No. Never.
This is the bond that would never materialize, the level of love and friendship that rises above all else—all else, even the most basic instinct of personal survival.
When I had learned of Dahlia’s indiscretion, her illicit affair with Entreri, I was not surprised, and not merely because of my own role in driving her away, my inattentiveness to her. She made of me a cuckold, something Catti-brie would never have done, under any circumstance. And I was not surprised at the revelation, for this basic difference between the two women was clear for me to see all along. Perhaps I deluded myself in the beginning with Dahlia, blinded by intrigue and lust, or by the quaint notion that I could somehow repair the wounds within her, or most likely of all, by my need to replace that which I had lost, but I always knew the truth.
When Effron told me of her dalliance with Entreri, I believed him immediately because it resonated with my honest understanding of my relationship and of this woman. I was neither surprised nor terribly wounded because this was who I knew Dahlia to be. However I lied to myself, however I tried to believe the best of the woman, this was who I knew Dahlia to be.
I wanted to remake the Companions of the Hall. More than anything in all the world, I wanted to know again the level of friendship and trust—honest and deep, to the heart and to the soul—that I had known for those years with my dearest friends. The world can never brighten for me until I have found that, and yet I fear that what I once knew was unique, derived of circumstances I cannot replicate.
In joining with Entreri and the others, I tried to salve that wound and re-create the joy of my life.
But in considering the new band of adventurers, there entails the inevitable comparison, and in that, all that I have accomplished is to rip the scab from the unhealed wound.
I find that I am lonelier than ever before.