A tragedy

(Still the same music, it's just beautiful XD)

...........

"In that case, let me!", Gardos said.

"Hmmm... Where should I begin?", the boy quietly mumbled, collecting his thoughts.

"It's already more than three years ago that I last saw my parents, so I can't remember things as clearly anymore. My father had been a mercenary in a small band. I think they only had about ten fighters in total. So they actually got only relatively rarely employed for jobs that actually involved fighting.

But in between those jobs, they would mostly get employed in groups of two or three as guards for some smaller villages on the western border of the kingdom. Over there, especially the closer you get to the great forest, the villages are under the constant threat of monster attacks.

My mother lived in one of those villages. As you may have guessed already, they met first when my father got contracted to protect her village. My father always said, when he saw my mother for the first time, he fell for her head over heels. And in a night were both of them had drunken a little too much, my father got her pregnant. Although it seemed like he only found out when he returned from one of his rare jobs after about two months.

My father said, that when he found out that it was his child, he immediately took responsibility and married her. And sometime later, I was born. After that came some happy years. Most of the time, my father would be working as the village's guard, but he would still be away for about two or three months every year. At the same time, to get some extra income, my mother would have to leave the village every now and then for a few days.

Then someday, my father left again for a job. And although it was much more dangerous than their usual ones, the pay was that much higher as well. This time, he came only back after almost half a year, and he was alone. He was the sole survivor of that job as the rest of their group had died, it seemed that the one who had given them the job had been lying in some crucial points, making it seem as if the job was less dangerous than it actually was.

But when he finally came back, it was already too late. About a week prior, my mother had run away together with the man she had been seeing whenever she had been leaving the village. Sometime later, my father had told me that he knew about that the entire time, but he had been loving her so much that he could forgive her somehow as long as she stayed with him.

In the end, he took me who had been left with the villagers at that time and went here, to harborton. He bought a small house with the money earned from the last job and worked as a city guard. But in the end, he couldn't forget about my mother no matter what he tried. He would come home drunk every night, and although he tried to so many times that I lost count, he never was able to hit me, the son she had given him. After that, he would always cry himself to sleep.

And whenever he woke up, he would feel a little bit worse than the day before. In the end, he couldn't bear with it anymore and hanged himself.

When the guards found out, they put me into an orphanage in the southern area, the turtle's territory. What happened after that was quite simple, I stupidly ran away, trying to find my mother. You can probably imagine what happened after that. I couldn't find shit. Well, actually more shit than I would have liked. After one week of living in the streets, I came back to the orphanage. But at that time, they told me that since I ran away, they wouldn't have to take responsibility for me anymore and wouldn't take me in again.

In the end, I somehow survived in the Free-zone for about two years. At that point, I somehow managed to pickpocket Jake, the leader of the Guardians at that time, and after some back and forth they tested me and ended up taking me in.", Gardos finished his story.

Alice was speechless, she didn't know what to say. No matter how long she thought about it, she couldn't tell if it was Gardos or her, who of them was worse of. But she soon stopped thinking these kinds of thoughts, she had realized that comparing their misfortune wasn't something she should do.

Alice also realized that she had made a huge mistake. Somehow, she had always assumed that stories were always fun. Some sad things would happen, but if you looked back on the story, most of it, and especially the end would be all happiness and fun.

Until now, Alice had approached this situation with this way of thinking and somehow assumed that they would all sit together and have fun telling cool stories. But now she realized, the stories they would be telling weren't all happiness and fun, they all had lost something, or else they wouldn't be here right now. All of their stories had a bad ending.

But at the same time, Alice could see a strange kind of beauty in this sad story. The wonderful beauty of a husband that could do anything for his wife, the beauty of unconditional love. The strange beauty of the never healing wound that would be left behind once this love was lost. And the painful beauty of the man's death, a death self-chosen for he wasn't able to bear living anymore. It was the beauty of a tragedy that Alice learned of for the first time in her life.

But even a tragedy would end, like any other story. And what came afterward could just as well be the happy story Alice had been waiting for. As long as you keep on living, stories would always end, and new ones would begin, like that, there would be bad times in one's life, but also many good times. After all, didn't they all sit here together right now? Hadn't they all been happy when they finally caught that thief and hadn't Alice been happy when they asked her if she wanted to join them?