[GW2] Forlorn ✔

III Phobias

It's the last day before you set off to the north, one of the early and warm days of fall, and you're sitting in a patch of light, like a cat, drinking from a flask, trying to forget about your worries. Only for a few minutes. It should be so easy, there are flowers all over the Grothmar Valley. It's almost like the first day of spring.

You could be sitting in the pub with the rest, eating, joking and getting totally hammered for the last time. But sometimes you like being alone.

Not completely, you still hear cubs playing on the farm and legionaries bickering over something mundane. So technically? You're not alone.

Two things you are known for that have nothing to do with your fighting skills - how well you can hold your liquor and all the great jokes you know.

(The first one you prove right now by drinking absinthe straight out that flask. No, you definitely shouldn't, but that's the Ascalon way. Smelling like wormwood and forlorn.)

And there's that one joke, a great joke, that you heard once in Elona and absolutely loath. It's not nasty or disrespectful - actually, it might be the most kid-friendly joke you know. But you hate it anyway because it hits too near home to your liking. It goes like this:

"There're three men living on a deserted island, they have been there for months. They're starving, desperate and afraid. One day, while scavenging the shore, they find the magic lamp. They touch it and right in front of them appears djinn, and he says "Ah, you freed me from my binds, for which I am eternally grateful. To prove it, each one of you may now ask me for one thing and I will grant you your wishes."

"The first man wishes to go home to his family, so djinn clasps his hands and man disappears. The second man wishes to go home to his wife, so djinn goes "Poof!" and the man teleports away. The third man looks around, at the deserted shore of forgotten island and back at djinn, and finally, he says. He says:

"I do not want to be alone. I wish my friends were back here."

There're so many stages of what constitutes as 'alone'. You wish to never be so bored and isolated that you would start actually thinking about the definition.

It's too philosophical for you - norn don't deal with philosophy. Yes, you all talk with Spirits of the Wild and run to shamans with every simple problem, but no norn asks themselves "What exactly am I afraid of?"

Not of bears - you're hardly a norn if you didn't beat one of them with your bare hands. But fear is not bad, shamas always say that. Fear is a natural reaction of body and mind, and overcoming it is the core of survival. We were afraid of the darkness and cold, so we learned to make fire. We were afraid of the Mist, so we learned how to enter it. We were afraid of the Elder Dragon, so we... Well, you're still working on that one, but at least someone already took their tooth.

That's the Norn way - surviving no matter what. Surviving, but never being alone, not really. Humans or Asura might be arrogant enough to think they can overcome everything like it's a solo mission, but Norn? Norn have clans, families, and lodges in Hoelbrak - norn are together, knowing the power of unity.

So that's it, that's the reason why you're lying in flowers on a meadow in Ascalon, drinking alone. You get what the third guy from that joke was thinking. It's less painful to die with your friends at your side, even if the price is that you, personally, doom them to death.