The Weight of a Long Life

For those of us who may see a thousand years or longer, with our bodies scarcely beginning to fail before nine centuries, the passage of time becomes less a river and more a slow-grinding glacier. Among my own people, and even in conversation with the dverger, whose four centuries seem short to us and infinite to humans, there is a shared complaint we seldom voice aloud: befriending humans hurts. By the time we have truly learned who they are, by the time their presence feels woven into the fabric of our days, age has already begun to steal them away from us. I think of Etharon and Isoli, and how young they were when the years claimed them; of the long roads we walked together, now reduced to ink and memory. I marched beside their twin sons after them, Levak and Kavel, and now Levak himself is past forty, already approaching the ragged edge of a human span worn thinner by war and duty. Even Esriella, his half-aelv queen, and my dear, kind friend, has perhaps three centuries remaining if fortune and the gods are kind, while I may see at least four; if one was to exclude my intentional fracturing of my own soul to access vharin, and thus prolonging my own life. That is, of course, assuming my constant wandering and meddling do not cut my thread early. And now there is Valin, their son, a quarter-aelv who may see two hundred years if he is careful. I watch him grow, knowing I will likely stand at the edge of his grave as I did for his grandparents while I remain unchanged except for the growing pain inside. It is a slow, accumulating pain, this business of outliving those one loves. Yet I accept it as part of my charge. Etharon and Isoli entrusted me, implicitly, if never in so many words, with the futures of their blood. Until I can no longer walk this world, I will watch over their descendants as best I can, even as I hunt the thing that stole my own future from me. Duty, it seems, is the one companion time has not yet managed to take from me.