Vireyda slinks before you, arrayed in dark black leathers and armour. Her short dark black brown hair shimmers faintly with slight gold red highlights, framing a delicate face with finely cut features and you note the soft tips of her elvish ears. Her soft brown eyes peer curiously at you as she smiles faintly. However, you suddenly note the dagger in her hand behind her back and wonder about her intentions...An aura of sadness envelopes her though, speaking of loves and battles lost now...

I was born in the Elven Forest. An odd place you would say, but I am a half elf...so not quite so odd. I vaguely remember my mother, a wandering sorceress elf of the Clan Liorinin. Ah my mother...she loved the winds, loved the freedom of the winds as they blew through her frosted ebony hair. I remember her once holding me by the fire and showing me a beautiful dagger. She called it a "Blade of Jiir" and it had belonged to my father. I remember that dagger well, it was a halfarm long and almost a short sword with cryptic runes spanning the silvered blade and a platinum wire-wrapped hilt wrought into the form of a snarling grey wolf studded with sparkling moonstones that contained an almost red fire in them. I recall trying to grab the dagger (I believe I was 5) but she wouldn't let me. She said it had belonged to my father and that I wasn't strong enough to have it yet. I would have to wait..

My father. Some nights, in our home in the woods around the fair Eluten, I would watch my mother from my bed furs. I would see her cry and hold the dagger and pull a simple gold-knot ring from her special pouch. My father was human, a fact that the pure elven children of Eluten would never let me forget. I remember hating my father for that. But how could I be foolish..my mother was so in love with him, even after his death. My mother had met my father during the aftermath of the Stygian wars. A wanderer of the winds, she had strayed all the way to the dark city of Hylar. My father was a Hylarean Guardsman. I don't recall what he looks like for he died when I was a lil less than a year old. Apparently for some reason, he felt kindness to my elven mother and did not send her to the prison like the other elves were or worse. Oddly enough, I truly don't understand what they did. But amazingly enough, he and my mother fell in love and married secretly. She lived in Hylar with him, forced to use her sorcery to conceal herself. But something happened and my mother had to flee. I was born in the woods during her flight. My mother found an abandoned cabin in the woods and stayed there with me. I never met my father. However, just after I was born...my mother left me in the care of some windspirits (so she said) and returned secretly to Hylar. When she returned it was pregnant with my brother and clutching the bloodied dagger of her husband, my father. Apparently, he had been killed...it was never discovered how and my mother never told me.

My brother Albannon was only with us briefly. Sadly, he died at birth and I never met him either since I was but a year old I don't really remember much except my mother once again crying. There is a grave out beyond that cabin that bears a riotous bunch of flowers on it. And so we were alone. My mother and I. Not even the elves or my mother's family would see us. I was half-breed, half-HUMAN, a disgusting bastard that should not be allowed in Eluten. I grew to despise those uppity elven ways....Oh I felt elven and different from the humes that I did see, but I was not one of THEM. The Sithari elves were the worst. When I was about 14, my mother died. It was quiet and sudden, like the breath had blown out of her and rejoined the winds that she loved and magicked with. I buried her by myself next to my brother. And then I entered Eluten without her. I was shunned, but I trained and gathered my due from my family and the city of my kind. And then I left. I decided that I too would wander the realms..I would not be chained to that city and its cruelty to halfbreeds.

I remember traveling to the city of Lirath, the farthest I had gone back then, and meeting two people I would not soon forget. One was a human priest and the other a Hylarean, a human Dark Knight. They aided me and taught me more of my human heritage. I later also was helped by a dwarven Dark Knight and was able to become a Dark Initiate and then graduate to the rank of squire in the Dark Knights, the elite occult warriors in the homeland of my father. Thus I started down the dark path and begin to strive to gain more experience as a Knight of Darkness.

My early years as a Dark Knight were fraught with difficulties. I was entering my homeland again and was attacked by both elves and the evil drow. I became an outcast in the truest sense. I lost all ties with my homeland when I was attacked in what I still then naively considered my homeland. Almost in retaliation, I joined the ranks of The Chaos Legions as soon as I was able. It is a choice I regret slightly, for I do feel the call of my human side and long for the comfort of Kingdom which accepts halfelves more readily than the elves.

I spent some time in Pesvint and learned their arts of brewing as well as traveling to the Faeryland and many other places in the realms. Slowly, I began to find myself as I gained more and more experience and rose within the ranks of the Dark Knights til I arrive to its highest level...a Greater Demonness of Death. Although, I had achieved the highest rank possible by my order, I was and am still young and naive. I now possess my father's blade. I am human, I am elf, I am evil, I am a Dark Knight. I am as I always would be....I am simply myself.

End passage one...flipping through the journal's pages, we find another page...

Times have passed, things have changed and so have I. A cataclysm rocked the Realms and I was booted to the lowest ranks of squires. Slowly I rose once again to the forefront of the Knighthood. That was by force. However, battles were lost. I also have lost one whom I held dear to me. And so in a fit of anger, pique, sorrow and gods knows what else, I relinquished the title of Greater Demonness and wandered out again to find my path. I reentered the Knighthood after a period of serious pain and contemplation. Before I did though...I had a moment of doubt...a moment when the Psions world beckoned to me, a world where I was not judged by the strictures of honor - a world without the pain of my past and the concerned fear of my future. But, I chose the hard path. I have no other option before me. The Knighthood's honor and aura call to me like no other. I am at heart, a Knight. I may falter in my honor, in how I keep my vows, I may fall in battle and be defeated - but I must always make that attempt. And in the learning, I learn more of myself and more of how to keep to that which I hold true. I pray that someday soon I find peace again with myself.

I fear it will only come in death.

End passage two...flipping through the journal's pages, another page appears...

I have finally cut my most binding of ties. I am no longer a Dark Knight. The code, the honor, the fealty to Kindom all of it is behind me. I have finally left those parts of me that caused me so much pain in the dust. The druids' neutral ways have beckoned me with the murmur of a simple existance. A world of plant and tree, a simple view of balance and adherence to the ways of Gaia, Veliannis, Carsten and others. I've found some measure of peace. Although the stirrings of the Knighthood still fire my blood, the shriek of a wyvern still ignites excitement and passion in my blood.

This respite the druids have held for me in their forest thicket comforts me, but is still brief. The one who brung me to the druids is ever their for me, I am comforted by his love and presence. But, there is still a darkness inside me that will not be quenched, that strives ever for power, for the call of the Knighthood. A part of me will always be with him, he is slowly becoming a part of my soul as well as being my love, but there is a part of me always separate, always dark.

Only time will tell.

Scrawled in a dark woodsy ink, another passage emerges ...

I've come into my own. The gods of nature have smiled on me and blessed me with a vision of the world. The world is teetering slowly and I'm a part of that imbalance. I am a druid and the balance is my life...however I must maintain the shift of balance for if nature itself followed a path of no change, it would stagnate. There must be change and life and death, differences in order to produce the balance that is inherent to nature. This is my goal, this is my dream. Darkness has its place in the world and in me, but so does the hope of balance.

By my hand and sword,