Telré Astirafal

Telré A'stirafal (Friend of my Pained Heart)

by Telré A'stirafal

4/3/90

My dam took me on a walk one day in my tenth year. Through the woods, into the woods, one with the woods. We could hear the breathy sigh of trees with our elvish ears, feel the love and the touch of Nature herself beneath our skin. We nestled by a brook, I within her ever-loving and warm arms, and I braved to ask her for the truth.

I spoke the elvish tongue with the practice of one born to it, although I was a half-elven bastard. The language is fast, a single word being equal to a full sentence in human tongues. The sounds and combinations of sounds much more diverse and specific at the same time.

"What of my sire? What became of him? The others tell me things that I do not believe."

Kalatha, my mother, hid her wry smile behind a sigh and thoughtful stare at a spot four feet away from nowhere. Birds twittered and sang, leaves rustled in the breeze and glinted yellow and rust in the autumn sunlight.

"I became a member of an adventuring party, professing as a user of craft." My ears almost visably pricked up, for I wished to become an adventurer, and I was apprenticed to my mother to learn magic, or the craft as she and other elves called it, it being as simple to them as woodwork to an artisan.

"They did not know I used more than that. I thought it funny, amusing, to try to fool them. They were me, and male at that! What should I care what became of them. There was one in particular, a fighter, big and strong. As strongly did he oppose Nature, and the elvish ways. On him did I wish to use my arts to...aquire his purse."

I smiled, this was good so far, but her seriousness sobered me, and I looked into her face, and saw the eyes that reflected a past not forgotten, not healed. Distant look, shadows and fear.

"All the better to loot his purse in a city, on a street, and I am so good that I was not caught. We settled between towns that night and as he slept a drunk's slumber, and I upon watch, I slipped it out to account it.

"Little did I realize he slept a warrior's slumber as well, and he arose in anger against me, grasped my arm and pulled me up off the ground," she rubbed her upper arms in painful recall, or perhaps trying to rub the stench of humanity off of them. "Then demanded, with the stink of wine in his breath, and flames reflected in his too-human eyes, for me to give him the purse.

"He dropped me to my feet, and I bent to gather the coins. He kicked me headlong into the coins and nearly into the fire, my eyes a scant inch or two from the stones. I squealed, and scurried backwards, as would any soul with life, and almost knocked into him.

"His hands grabbed the front locks of my hair and dragged me into a standing position again, only to be forced back onto my bedding. He tore away swatches of clothes at a time from me. He raped me. Sonofastinkingape!

His buddies, thank the Sun and Moon, were dead asleep, or didn't care. He left his seed in me, then fell into a stupor again. I struggled free of him, and I took up his sword. I still don't understand why I didn't kill the human sonofastinkingape! Perhaps it was only my ties to Life and Nature. I stuck the blade into the fire, right into the coals, then turned him over. I branded him right on his forehead, a scar on his skin for the internal scar I bore. He awoke a little but fainted from pain. I quickly scooped up coins, and ran for the woods with his sword."

I digested her story for a moment or two, staring into the tiny stream flowing over rocks and silt, and at the leaves floating in dance-patterns along the water. Some of what others said was true. Some of it was not, but now I understood. My mother had run, and eventually come across the small community of elvish outcasts. When she discovered she was bearing a half-elven bastard, she had little choice but to stay.

Thus the name she had given me, double edged: "Telré A'stirafal" or "Friend of my heart's pain." I winced. It could also be "Son of my heart's pain" or "son of rape." Telré, my common name, meant simply "friend." I later took on the name Rafal as a cover, knowing it meant "Heart's pain."

She read the look in my eyes. "I'm sorry, Telré. That is why I call you my telré, now. The pain is there, the rape happened, but you are you and what-has-happened is done. You are no more than my 'son' and my 'friend' now. Now, I am Thal."

I thought wryly, Telran A'stirafal, "son of heart's pain," son of my mother. "As for how I got here, I came upon a villa at dawn, just as it began to awaken. I was barely what some would call clothed,