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Red Never Washes Out
Blood runs eternally red.  Who we are is encompassed within that virulent, crimson flow that pulses within every vein.  Yet, there are some things that never wash out, no matter how much we might wish to dilute them.  I am and always will be K’alagreth’s daughter.  He is part of my blood, part of my past — but I refuse to let him have any part in my future.
My father, such as he was, is dead and has been dead since the summer I turned fifteen.  For years, I listened in weeping terror as that pig brutalized my mother more times than I could feasibly count.  He broke her — a proud, fierce Moonkeeper huntress in her own right — and he broke her.  So repulsed and shattered by the situation in which she found herself, my mother retreated to the deepest recesses of her mind and stayed there.
As she lay there on the floor, her skull fractured and the rest of her bruised and beaten with bones broken — something within me was unleashed.  A rage, a fury so potent that it consumed everything that I was or could be.  I only have the dim recollection of grabbing a knife from the kitchen and laying into K’alagreth with a will.  The stab wounds were so numerous that there was often no telling one from another.  His torso was mutilated beyond all recognition.
Yes, journal, I killed my father.  I would do it again, given half the chance, after what he did to my mother.  We left the remnants of K’alagreth’s tribe and I took my mother to Gridania in hopes that the Conjurers there might heal her of her affliction.  However, though their magic set her wounds and her physical body to rights, there was something far beyond their ability to heal that was shattered in her mind.
I should have stayed with her and cared for her, but my rage and my hatred still ran deep.  Instead, I gave her care over to a kindly Hyuran woman in Gridania and took myself out into the world to earn the gil that would pay for Mother’s upkeep.  Yet, still I return home to visit and to bring fresh flowers; hoping against hope that this time that I visit is the time that Mother rouses and we can set our lives aright.
It is, perhaps, a hope in vain but it is all I have left.
![[Image: bravedieonce.png]](https://sanguinestorm.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/bravedieonce.png)
   
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