3. Anja Willowmein

Anja Willowmein


  • account: mirrorpool
    char: Anja Willowmein

    Well after father died, one of his old friends gave me this journal Told me it would help me sort my thoughts. Let's see if it works.

    There isn’t much of my story to tell, really. I guess I’ll start from the beginning. I was born 19 full summers ago and then a little extra. I hear it was a pretty hot and miserable day, so far as Narfell gets hot. I certainly believe the miserable part. Sort of set the stage.

    My parents, Dale and Eva Willowmein, weren’t really any folk of account, in the grand scheme of things. Decent people, I’m told. I don’t remember too much about my mother, really. More of just feelings and pictures behind my eyes. Smells of cookies, bread, and stew. Father never remarried. He spent most of his days doing odd jobs. He worked with his older brother on the farm for a time, but they had a falling out when I was too young to remember what it was about really. Older, I caught on to hints of gambling and some lost money. All behind now.

    A few months before he passed away, my father got a pretty stable job with the town militia. They were hurting for folks pretty bad then. My father joked that they would have taken anybody and proved it when they took him, but the truth of it is, he’d always wanted the job. Something more respectable than branding cows or kicking people out of alehouses. Miserable as life is, though, it couldn’t last. The biggest goblin attack of his short career was his last. Taken down by an arrow over the wall while he was on the tower.

    I was told the news the next morning when I was putting together his lunch, expecting him home any minute. His best friend, Paul, brought me his spear. I didn’t cry when he was there, trying to comfort me, tell me what a good man my father was, how he’d turned around and given up drink and how we could all improve through his example. Eventually he kind of wandered out, wished me well and comfort.

    Father always prayed to Lathander. Figured it did him good have a good god or two on his side. So I went to the temple with his spear and said a few prayers. I didn’t cry then either, in fact, it was like the steel and cold I made myself feel when Paul was there had taken over. It felt wrong, but that’s how it was. I got pretty angry then, shouting to Lathander that if I was to mourn, then give me a sign, give me a tear at least. But nothing happen and it finally sunk in that my father was a nobody. I had known, in one way or another, but it hit me right then. Like the first time you realize your parents can lie, it hit me that they could live the wrong way. I picked up that spear and held it in my hands. I decided right then and there that I wouldn’t waste time in the past no more. That I’d find my own strength and my way out of Norwick.


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