Estyr

Chapter Three

“Wait, what?” Jack asked, his mind simply refusing to accept what his mother had just admitted in plain words. His mother just looked him straight in the eyes without answering. Jack got the impression that it was taking everything within her to hold his gaze and not look away. This fact, however, meant very little to him. “What do you mean I was poisoned?” Jack barely heard it as his own voice rose. He was barely aware of how tightly both his fists and jaw were clenched. His mind was desperate to convince itself that he had misheard her.

“I mean that ever since you were four years old, I have been poisoning you,” she answered her voice barely above a whisper.

It was like a gut punch from a fist of steel. None of it made sense! His mother, the one person that had done the most to help him not only manage his sickness but to also overcome it. The one person that had motivated him to do the absolute most that he could in anything that he did. The one who didn’t settle for anything other than the best out of him. The one who’d shown him that his limits were much farther than he could have ever imagined them to be. This was a dream… no, it was a nightmare! He needed to wake up, he so desperately wanted to wake up from this horrible dream.

“Naturally, your next question will be, why?” She went on when he said nothing clearly unable to string together any two words. “Sadly, I have nothing to offer that would satisfy you in any way, or justify what I have done,” she stated.

“You stole my childhood!” Jack roared his fist pounding the countertop. “You owe me an explanation!” He shouted. The pain that was coursing through him was quickly turning into white-hot rage.

“It might not yet be clear to you just yet,” His mother spoke quietly despite Jack’s burst of fury. The amount of guilt in her voice doubled with each word she uttered. “But I have taken from you far more than just your childhood,” she informed him as she finally could no longer hold his gaze and her eyes dropped to the counter before him.

“When the war ended, I hang around your mother and father,” she began. “At the time, I had convinced myself that it was only because I owed your mother a debt that had to be paid,” A bitter chuckle left her as she continued. “Would you believe that it took me all the time till just this last week for me to realize that I actually considered them friends. That I actually enjoyed being around them,” It was clear as she spoke that her own image of herself was losing more and more of her respect the more she spoke. The rage coursing within him, however, left no room for pity of any kind. An explanation that would justify it all to him was all that mattered to him.

“I watched the two of them fall deeper and deeper in love with each other and at the time I couldn’t help but think them stupid,” she said. “How is it that they could not see? I asked myself. Sydrar would come back and the war would continue. All the hopes and dreams they were building of a long peaceful life together happy in each other’s arms were just that, dreams,” she continued. “I thought myself the smartest and most clearheaded of the three of us. It’s only now looking back that I see that this was not the case. You see, your parents had, whether consciously or not, understood something that I never did,” she explained.

“They understood that it was not enough to just fight off evil, that it wasn’t enough to just fight for the living. You had to live as well, you had to contribute to the good as well,” she said her voice reflecting her surprise at the simplicity of the epiphany. A truth so simple that she had missed it entirely. “I had fought with everything I had for the living, but beyond the fight, I had nothing that I lived for. I had dedicated my life to protecting your mother, but even that was just me biding time, waiting for the next fight to be part of,” she said a bitter note in her voice.

“I was an empty shell. On the outside, I was a strong warrior deadly in battle and held in high regard by many. But on the inside, I had nothing. No one that I cared about, No one that cared about me. If I died, all that would be left of me would be the warrior, the killer, no one would know who Commander Izora was as a person, and who could blame them? No one, not even your parents had seen anything more of me other than the warrior,” she said.