Andarin: The Mountains: Anyone;

** T R I S T A N **

You know that feeling that you get when you get home after a long day at work? That amazing feeling that finally you can just sit down and relax and do whatever? Well, this wasn’t that kind of feeling. Not in the slightest. This was more of one of those I’m at grandma’s house and it’s stinky and uncomfortable because you have to sit on that old smelly couch and pretend like you are interested while you both watch CNN. Yea. It was like that kind of feeling.

My name is Tristan, and I was born here. Yeah, believe it or not, this is my home, though really I couldn’t believe I had come here after all that had happened. I laugh at the thought of my conception, of being born here on this rather peaceful soil. Hah, yea. Me, peaceful. I wasn’t like my sister, nor was I like my mother. From what she had told me, I was like what she imagined my father was like at a young age. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t. Really, I don’t care. I am Tristan, and I’m not like anyone. People didn’t like me where I was before, so I decided to come back here. To the Element, to my sad little family that apparently needed me more than I needed them. Back to being the son of an Oracle and a Spy, nothing more. To them I’d be nothing more than the son of the Knight and his Crane. I smile to myself. I’d show them a thing or two about who I was. And they’d remember it too.

Where exactly I was going, I didn’t really know. How long I had been traveling I wasn’t sure either. Soon I was there, ironically at the very place that I was conceived, away from my father and sister. The thought of love made me laugh, of Nicodemus and his Hawthorne. It was a silly notion, and look where it had gotten my parents. Tragedies don’t do so well for me. Sure, I knew the story, I had been there, in shadows, but there nonetheless. I had heard the muffled screams of my mother, tears welling in my child eyes. I remembered the sight of my father, trapped and unable to save her. Upon seeing my aunt and father carrying her lifeless body away to the sea I had run, just as my father had run upon seeing the lifeless form of his mother. Ironic? But before I had left, I stopped for a visit with her. Sister, the only thing I really cared about. Skylar always had that about her. She was able to make the most careless of us love her. Perhaps it was because she had loved so fiercely.

“Sister!” I had cried, running to embrace her in a hard hug before my leave. “I love you. Take care of Dad.” She had looked up to me with big doll-like eyes, confused as ever. She was my older sister, and yet in reality I had always been the elder of us. “But….Tristan….you can’t….leave.” The lower part of her lip began to shake, and tears were threatening to spill from her beautiful sapphire eyes. So I began what I thought was a lie. “I’ll be back, I promise…”

And here I was, fulfilling the promise I had left her with. What a laugh. Where she was, I had no clue. I laugh again. It seems that I didn’t much have a clue about anything. Perhaps it made me a fool, perhaps it didn’t.

What I did know is that I was here, in Andarin, my body leaning against a tree with little care, eyes half-lidded lazily. Waiting…waiting…