managed to catch the drow's attention, and his slight nod confirmed everything between them.
"He failed us, so why not kill him?" the giant beside Gerti asked.
"His hatred for Obould will only grow," the giantess explained. "He will try again. His role in this drama is not yet done."
She looked back to the hillock as she spoke, to see Obould standing imperiously, his greatsword raised in defiance, and behind him, the shamans and other orcs howled for him, and for Gruumsh.
Gerti looked back to Drizzt and hoped her prediction would prove correct.
"Find a way to kill him, Drizzt Do'Urden," she whispered, and she recognized the desperation in her own voice and was not pleased.
PART FOUR
THE BALANCE OF POWER
There is a balance to be found in life between the self and the community, between the present and the future. The world has seen too much of tyrants interested in the former, selfish men and women who revel in the present at the expense of the future. In theoretical terms, we applaud the one who places community first, and looks to the betterment of the future.
After my experiences in the Underdark, alone and so involved in simple survival that the future meant nothing more than the next day, I have tried to move myself toward that latter, seemingly desirable goal. As I gained friends and learned what friendship truly was, I came to view and appreciate the strength of community over the needs of the self. And as I came to learn of cultures that have progressed in strength, character, and community, I came to try to view all of my choices as an historian might centuries from now. The long-term goal was placed above the short-term gain, and that goal was based always on the needs of the community over the needs of the self.
After my experiences with Innovindil, after seeing the truth of friends lost and love never realized, I understand that I have only been half right.
"To be an elf is to find your distances of time. To be an elf is to live several shorter life spans." I have learned this to be true, but there is something more. To be an elf is to be alive, to experience the joy of the moment within the context of long-term desires. There must be more than distant hopes to sustain the joy of life.
Seize the moment and seize the day. Revel in the joy and fight all the harder against despair.
I had something so wonderful for the last years of my life. I had with me a woman whom I loved, and who was my best of friends. Someone who understood my every mood, and who accepted the bad with the good. Someone who did not judge, except in encouraging me to find my own answers. I found a safe place for my face in her thick hair. I found a reflection of my own soul in the light in her blue eyes. I found the last piece of this puzzle that is Drizzt Do'Urden in the fit of our bodies.
Then I lost her, lost it all.
And only in losing Catti-brie did I come to see the foolishness of my hesitance. I feared rejection. I feared disrupting that which we had. I feared the reactions of Bruenor and later, when he returned from the Abyss, of Wulfgar.
I feared and I feared and I feared, and that fear held back my actions, time and again.
How often do we all do this? How often do we allow often irrational fears to paralyze us in our movements. Not in battle, for me, for never have I shied from locking swords with a foe. But in love and in friendship, where, I know, the wounds can cut deeper than any blade.
Innovindil escaped the frost giant lair, and now I, too, am free. I will find her. I will find her and I will hold onto this new friendship we have forged, and if it becomes something more, I will not be paralyzed by fear.
Because when it is gone, when I lay at death's door or when she is taken from me by circumstance or by a monster, I will have no regrets.
That is the lesson of Shallows.
When first I saw Bruenor fall, when first I learned of the loss of my friends, I retreated into the shell of the Hunter, into the instinctual fury that denied pain. Innovindil and Tarathiel moved me past that destructive, self-destructive state, and now I understand that for me,