When I was 10 my mother's lover asked me who I respected most in the world. My answer, without even pausing to think, was, "My dad." He laughed in my face and told me I was a fool. That my father was a no good drifter who had had no life ahead of him. That I wouldn't even be there if my father hadn't been dying.

I told him that didn't matter. I still respected him. He asked me why. After all, I never even knew the man.

"He loved my mother," was my reply. "And that's more than I can say for you." I never saw him again.

My father was a drifter, just as that man said. He had grown up in the same small village as my mother, just across the border from the Kreian capitol. They'd been childhood sweethearts, back before she had developed the gifts that make her so powerful today, and her great beauty. He had loved her for the person she was, not for the important figure that she is now. And that was why she continued to love him, even after he abandoned her.

Which he did. He couldn't stand staying in one place; it drove him mad. Simply living in the village during his childhood had already been enough to unbalance his mind more than a little, and he'd left as soon as his mother, my grandmother, would call him an adult. At sixteen he left the village, and my mother.

He was an empath, like many priests and healers are. The difference is that he could not control the "gift." He couldn't keep other people's feelings out, and that was why he couldn't stay. Staying in one place for a while caused his mind to attune to the people around him. Before long he started to lose his sense of self. So, staying in one place caused him to lose his mind, literally.

I am under no illusions that he was a great man. I know, both from my mother and from others, that he was more than a little mad. He didn't remember people at all, and he had to live by going from town to town, working odd jobs to get money. He died an ignoble death, his mind finally collapsing under the strain of an exotic illness he caught in the southlands. Still, he loved my mother for who she was, and I will eternally respect him for that.

I know from my own visions of the past that my mother was not always the regal, powerful beauty she is now. Before he gifts showed, she was rather plain. She was nothing special to look at when she and my father knew each other in the village. She was a wonderful person though, kind and caring, with an unquenchable thirst for life.

She tired most people out, but my6 father loved her. She was the one person he could be around without fear of losing himself, not because he couldn't feel her, but because she was so close to him that her feelings weren't intruding. She was like a part of him, and he a part of her, two bodies, but one heart.

Perhaps the shock of him leaving is what triggered her gifts. Perhaps it was a coincidence that it happened when it did. Whatever the reason, after he left she started to show her own psychic powers. She had healing, prescience, clairvoyance, a sixth sense, and more, but never the empathy that he had. An expert said once that she should have developed empathy, but that she was blocking it subconsciously. Still, she was fast becoming one of the most gifted people in the known world.

As her powers developed so did her confidence, and her beauty. I have seen, in my visions, how she changed from a plain, forgettable girl to a ravishing beauty who would turn the heads of the most narcissistic, demanding men out there. And as her beauty and power increased, she thanked a higher power and turned faith.

She turned not to the faith of the One God, as she had been raised, but to the nature worship of the elves. She became one of their healers, a rare position for a human, since healing is very rarely a gift for any but elves. Her growing power, charisma, and beauty caused her to rise quickly, and during her thirtieth year she became the first human High Healer ever.

Some people claim that she has to be an elf, with her power. They say that she can't be just a human with her radiant beauty and astonishing abilities, not to mention the fact that now, when she is almost sixty years old, she still looks like she did when she first joined the elven faith at age seventeen. Of course, I know that she isn't elven at all, no matter what kind of things other people say about her. Not even with her seemingly eternal youthful appearance.

That doesn't mean she's human though... I'm not sure what she is, but I am almost certain that neither she, nor my father, are human, just as I am not.