Journal of Sariella Sunblossom Entry 3

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I remember when we lost mother. How she never came back from her daily, priestly chores the day the Scourge arrived. Father was shattered... he spared me no feelings. He gave me no hope. He shared only grief. I remember his words when he told me, days later. "Your mother is dead, Sariella. Dead!". He said it with tears in his eye, clearly distraught. But such a thing for a child to hear... I was heartbroken too. Our grand home, in ruins... mothers garden, destroyed. My mother... the walking dead. Our legacy... ended. At least, thats what I had thought.
He had always wanted me to be a boy. Mother had nurtured my femininity, as a young girl. She'd buy me dolls, and pretty dresses... let me play with her facepaints, wear her bras, a shallow sort of feminity perhaps, but I remember how much father would scold me even when mother was alive, whenever she were not there. How he'd force me to polish his boots, how he'd force me yet further to practice swordfighting with him. He meant to break me, I'm sure, I was hardly a teenager at the time, yet every time I faltered he'd hit me hard with the wooden sword, bruising me. And when mother came back, I had to say I'd fallen in the garden. I'd had to say the splinters in my hands were a result of fences I'd been climbing over.
What I remember most about father were the beatings. The first ones, at least. How each blow against me felt like a million knives, at first, how I merely wished for death at the end of it. Sometimes, my death... eventually, usually his. If he wasn't a bastard before mothers death, he was afterward, he'd punish me for even the slightest wrong. Surely real boys wern't treated so by their fathers. The Sin'dorei are not Orcs, we value intellect, and curious pursuits, not brute strength and savage combat. Yet father was a savage brute, his hands clenched into hard, boney fists as they'd bruise my face, his boots caving my stomach in when I'd lost the strength to stand. His words like venom as he insulted me.
I remember how much I began to hate him. How I spited him, how I learned to tailor pretty dresses and clothes when he was not around, to anger him yet further. I was no longer afraid of him, the hurt, the pain, it was nothing anymore. I began to understand him. He was no man. He was just a brute. A coward.
The beatings continued into my late teenage years... eventually robbing me of my fertility. I can't bare a child because of him. The Sunblossom Legacy dies with me, his only child.
I remember when I was old enough to join the Blood Knights, the beatings never stopped. They merely continued. I had thought father might calm himself, upon me joining the military, something I deemed most masculine. But no... too accustomed to the beatings were he and I that they continued.
I remember my beloved Soraya, my master at the time, asking me why I seemed so drained, when we practiced healing. I told her I was simply not good at it yet... and she believed me. I felt guilty for lying to her though. I had to tell her.
I remember the moment she drew her blade across his throat. How I had expected to feel his pain, as if some familiar bond still linked us as Father and Daughter. I felt only relief... I felt only happiness as he bled out, as he gurgled his last words, as he stained the ground with his filthy blood.
I do not carry on his legacy. I carry on mothers. Though I am sure if she were still alive, she would be distraught in the knowledge her beloved, innocent, sweet bronzen daughter is now a Fel-sucking, Light-spiting, Bisexual Ex-Blood Knight, I only hope that she would be happy I bare her maiden name. Sunblossom.