I finally left the house of Daigan today. After the terrible incident involving the old man, I have been loathe to do so, too ashamed of my actions to bare the light of day and yet somehow, some way, the letters of Baradar have found me, even here.
Reading them, my heart is warmed. His reassurances reach me even in this land of terrors and I cannot help but feel thankful for knowing him. He tells me that I should feel no shame for what I have done and, whilst I appreciate his sentiment, yet I feel the need to repent somehow. Luckily, I have already discovered my course in this matter.
As I left the village, I chanced upon Avaldir. I know not how he found me, but find me he did. Even here, on these cobbled streets, it seems that he can track me. We shared some words. He vowed that he would protect me with his own life should the need arise. I realise that I should be pleased with such a declaration and yet I cannot help but be saddened by it. For someone to give their life for mine... how would I live with myself if it came to pass?
After a time he left and I travelled onwards. I struck out east once more, thinking to travel further into the Lone Lands. My quarry may not have been to the Forsaken Inn, I reasoned, but he may well have gone through the Weather Hills and onwards into the lands ahead. As I passed the Inn itself, however, one of the vagabonds who had seen me upon my last visit called out.
Warily, I went to see what he could want of me only to be told that a man fitting Davick's description had been seen enterting the establishment some time before and had not yet exited. Worried, fearful and yet not without hope, I entered that ill-smelling place and was told by the maid that the man I sought was down in the basement rooms.
Onwards I went, down into the gloom and sure enough there he sat upon a chair with a tankard in his hand. He was everything that I remembered and yet less somehow.
I will not go into detail here save to say that he tested me, as ever he had before, if less gently than on any of our previous encounters. We spoke for a time, most of which was spent with him telling me to leave and my refusing to do such until my reason for coming had been satisfied.
As I suspected, he was not responsible for what had occured in Combe. The tale he told worries me deeply. I fear for him, for his spirit, his mind, his freedom. Something is changed in him. He is not who he was. Recent events, those he has admitted to me and perhaps those he has not, have altered him. It is not much. He is still the man I have long since lost my heart to for all that he will never feel the same for me. Still, there is something lacking that had been there previously; something within that once was and now is not.
He pushes me away now. I suspect that is not because he has no further wish to know me, but because he feels that he must do so for my own sake. He once claimed to care and if such holds true, then his callous disregard and repeated demands that I leave were presumably in an effort to spare me further heartache at his hands or the danger that being too close to him now presents.
I realise, though, that there is naught I can do for him. My wolf is lost to me, perhaps indefinately, and nothing I can say at this time will lead him back. He must walk his path as surely as I must walk my own and, as much as it pains me to admit, it is all too possible that those paths will never again converge.
My love goes with him, for all that he has no need or wish for it.
Now, though, is the time that I must put that aside and look to myself and my own travels.
