It is easy to understand how love and hate can be wedded together. Strong emotions that are tied to the heart, true hatred cannot exist if pure love did not exist first. This is true of life and death. For something to have died, it had to have lived. They are as similar and opposite as male and female, light and dark, good and evil.
Diriko contemplated her musings as she gazed out the window of the tall spire and looked at the forest beyond. It was not the first time in the past four hundred years that she had explored them, and would probably not be the last. Her love of Sylinar had battled frequently over the years with her hatred at his betrayal. But she had risen, like the phoenix from the ashes of her love and had turned her back on her lover, the serpent of treachery. She had even said as much to the children she eventually raised, and in turn, to their children.
Had it been a month or a week after they discovered the properties of their prized trees before he left? She couldn't remember; age had at least taken time and turned its memories fuzzy at the edges. If only it could do so for her feelings.
She would have been content to let him stay in his mountain, while she stayed in hers if it hadn't been for the land sickness. She had wept as if her own children were dying one by one out in the grove. It had taken eight years to claim them all. Each year, she'd replanted hoping that her elementalists had been right. Praying that the land had truly been cleansed. But each time, it took them in ones and twos until finally this past winter the last had fallen.
Folding her hands into the sleeves of her sky blue robe, she gazed lovingly at the forest beyond. She would see that the twelve he had stolen were returned to their homeland.
"Siethidi, cut it all down. Use your knowledge of this land's history to hide why, but remove our beloved trees from this land at once. I don't care how you do it, I don't care what you tell them, just cut them down."
Bowing gracefully, Siethidi, an expert in equestrian studies, left his grandmother's side with a smile and a plan.
~*~ Thandiwe ~*~
ASGM of Events
