How long has it been since last I put quill to paper? Seven years? Eight? I can no longer be certain when my last entry was, for those tomes were consigned to the flames long since. All but one, and I have not looked upon it since that day.
The day I said goodbye.
I was so sure that he would have sent word or found a way to see me, as he had always done before, so certain that he would not have chosen to leave me in such a manner, that I came to believe him gone for good. What other explanation was there? Why else would I hear nothing from him? Why else would there be no news, no sighting, no sign? He must be dead, I told myself, and eventually I grew to believe it.
For the sake of his son, who deserved better than a mother forever in mourning, for the sake of my own sanity, I convinced myself of this terrible truth and did all in my power to move on from that pain.
And what matter it if I continued to see him as the years went by? A glimmer here, a flash there, a face in a crowd or a presence through the trees. There for but a moment, but gone when I looked again. Such visitations were nothing new to me. Such sightings of the long departed, the shadows and shades, the dreams of days gone by, were never outside of my experience.
I looked into the cracks between the worlds, and the denizens therein came to look upon me in return. That I saw him there, most often beside that tree-lined lake, spoke volumes. He was dead. He was beyond my reach and I, as I had feared for so long, had not only lost him, but failed him most keenly.
I lived on, as did his offspring. The only and best thing that could be done for him was to let him go, to mind the present and secure the future. I lived not for myself, but for our child.
It came as something of a surpise and a confusion, therefore, to have his shade speak with me in the very same spot in which I had bid farewell his spirit six years before. Never before had his shade uttered words. Never before had it sought to offer apology and explanation. Never before had it been solid enough to touch...
Almost a decade passed since his disappearance. Almost a decade since I last truly saw his face. Almost a decade since his promise of "One more job..." Less than that since a funeral performed without a body.
I should have been angry. I should have hated him for putting me through such heartache, for not being here to see his son grow up, for choosing wars of his own making over us, for putting himself in that position in the first place. I should have been angry, but instead I felt nought but relief.
He lives. He breathes. He has returned to me. Older. greyer, more worn, perhaps. The lines at the corners of his eyes are so much more deep now, but he seems, to me, no less proud for it, no less strong or sure, no less him.
Now, I sit here with six small books, each one a recounting of the past. I am not entirely certain what it was he wished me to see within these pages. Was the truth, as written by his own hand, meant to enlighten me as to the games he has played in the past and mayhaps sow doubt as to the veracity of his words now? Was it to fill in the blanks he had so purposely left in my knowledge back then? Is it a way by which to highlight his professed uncertainties and fears surrounding his new reality? His belief that, for all he is willing to try, he is ill-suited to fatherhood? Or, as he said when he gave these diaries into my keeping, does he simply wish me to know how much he cared for me even in the darkest days of our shared past?
Motives aside, he was correct in his assumption that I would find some of it distasteful. Tales of torture and ambitions realised with the blood of others, repeated refusals to lay aside his sword despite being offered respite and a new path to tread, willing servitude to darkness in a desire to become the blackest of shadows. These things I most certainly do not find pleasing to my eye, but although he kept much from me, I was never under any illusion as to what, or who, he truly was.
Nor am I blinded now.
