THE WIZARD AND THE SYLPH
Chapter Nineteen
Akaru Plays A Dangerous Game
Lily was not the only unique being then living within the Four Kingdoms. There was another: Akaru, half-troll, the unwanted outcome of a rape. Akaru's mother had been a human girl who had been ravished by a troll in a northern settlement twenty-eight years before. The experience alone would have been more than any normal girl of fifteen could bear, but her subsequent terror at her own resulting pregnancy, the never-ending reminder he represented in her life, the curdled admixture of love, pity and horror she felt of and for him, gradually drove her to madness, and in the end, shortly after his ninth birthday, caused her to take her own life.
She was not yet twenty-four.
The settlement was long abandoned now, reclaimed by the verdure from which it had been carved. Some distance away, atop a grassy knoll upon the lea, they had laid her to rest in an unmarked grave, as alone in death as she had been in life. Of those who yet lived, only Akaru remembered where she lay, and none marked the unmasking of his grief as he returned from time to time to place a handfull of tiny, pale-blue forget-me-not's upon her grave; the cheerful summer flower that
in life had been her favourite, and would always serve to remind him of the innocence that lay buried with and within her poor, tormented soul.