Legea: The Extras

Trivia: Berethar's Backstory (1)

Berethar was born in 2890 of the Second Era, two months before Mordred Kenhelm, in a small village in the mountains of Erahar called Edu Ghul, to an Eraharian mother and an Enydhwyn father.

His parentage was unusual in several ways. First (and this will be delved into a little further in part three of Sorrow and Song), his father Cirnac was one of an almost extinct house of Enydhwyn which had been wandering Legea for uncounted generations. Despite their nomadic lifestyle, they always returned to their fatherland to take a wife. Because they kept to their own cultural customs, wandered constantly, and only wedded from the stock of Enydhwyn, they were generally counted by any who observed them as strange folk, outcasts.

As if Berethar's heritage were not strange enough, however, Cirnac broke tradition. He married Iloen of Edu Ghul, against his parents' better judgment and even against his own. This should have lessened his outcast stripe in the eyes of Edu Ghul, of course, but it did not, because Cirnac picked the wrong girl.

Iloen, as alluded to briefly in the last chapter of Sorrow and Song, was a seer. This ability of the "second sight" is passed on through the female line, and acquired by having a legaeësse in one's ancestry. The village looked on her as nothing less than a witch, and feared and shunned her. She, for her part, was aware of her strangeness, and perhaps because of it she closed up. She was cold, not in a sense of aloofness, but simply a lack of warmth, of affection, of response. When she smiled or laughed, which was rare, it was not in a way that put people at ease, but one that alienated them even more. Even her parents said that she never loved anyone, and she never did love anyone, except Cirnac son of Culchayn. Cirnac, like she, was an outcast.

It was at her insistence that she and Cirnac were married. She invoked even her seer powers, which she rarely spoke of, to persuade Cirnac's parents to give their consent. And Cirnac did not take her from her home village, but stayed with her for a little. The compulsion was still on him to wander like his father had, and so he would wander, but he always returned to Edu Ghul.

Into this strange, outcast environment Berethar was born. And he was a little of a strange child himself: fierce, quiet, always wanting to know every matter to the very bottom, seeking solitude often. He could not tolerate leaving a task half-finished or attended to with any kind of incompleteness, and if he left something undone it was because he saw no need to have done it. With an absent father and a reserved, silent mother, he was lonely and did not know it; he avoided his brother's company because they were so different, and neither one cared to play with the other, and his sisters Mehyvyd and Maha had one another.

Then Lyathí was born. Lyathí had the farseeing look in her eyes, the Second Sight of her mother. Iloen saw it, marked it, and said nothing of it to Cirnac, who thought no more of his wife as a seer but simply as his wife. But a bond grew between Berethar and his youngest sister, an unstated, almost unacknowledged bond, for they were both minds of few words and raised by a mother of few words. And Berethar loved her deeply.

Lyathí was five, and Berethar ten, when Cirnac died at forty years of age. He had traveled the Fell Pass once, before Berethar was born, and he went to it again but was waylaid by Wild Men and slain there. The word came to the family in Erahar months later, by a man who had found his body and brought Cirnac's knife. Iloen kept the knife until Berethar was fifteen.

If anyone had asked Berethar why he loved his father, Berethar would have answered, "He is my father," and if that were doubted as being valid grounds, he would have replied, "Is that not enough?" He loved his father with a fierce filial love which was tied into the pride that he bore of his Enydhwyn heritage, for it was Cirnac who had built into him a love of that heritage, who had spoken to him the language of Enydhwyn and taught him their lineage. The memories that he carried of his father were more of a dim hero-figure than a guiding father, but they were enough to impel him to track down the murderers of that father and visit them with vengeance.