and accept your own limitations, and with them, the recognition that while you try to do the best you can, it will often prove inadequate.
And so it was then and there, on that mountainside watching the battle, in that moment when all seemed darkest, that I began to accept the loss of Bruenor and the others. Oh, the hole in my heart did not close. It never will. I know and accept that. But what I let go then was my own guilt at witnessing the fall of a friend, my own guilt at not having been there to help him, or there to hold his hand in the end.
Most of us will know loss in our lives. For an elf, drow or moon, wild or avariel, who will see centuries of life, this is unavoidable - a parent, a friend, a brother, a lover, a child even. Profound pain is often the unavoidable reality of conscious existence. How less tolerable that loss will be if we compound it internally with a sense of guilt.
Guilt.
It is the easiest of feelings to conjure, and the most insidious. It is rooted in the selfishness of individuality, though for goodly folks, it usually finds its source in the suffering of others.
What I understand now, as never before, is that guilt is not the driving force behind responsibility. If we act in a goodly way because we are afraid of how we will feel if we do not, then we have not truly come to separate the concept of right and wrong. For there is a level above that, an understanding of community, friendship, and loyalty. I do not choose to stand beside Bruenor or any other friend to alleviate guilt. I do so because in that, and in their reciprocal friendship, we are both the stronger and the better. Our lives become worth so much more.
I learned that one awful day, standing on a cold mountain stone watching monsters crash through the door of a place that had long been my home.
I miss Bruenor and Wulfgar and Regis and Catti-brie. My heart bleeds for them and yearns for them every minute of every day. But I accept the loss and bear no personal burden for it beyond my own emptiness. I did not turn from my friends in their hour of need, though I could not be as close to them as I would desire. From across that ravine when Withegroo's tower fell, when Bruenor Battlehammer tumbled from on high, I offered to him all that I could: my love and my heart.
And now I will go on, Innovindil at my side, and continue our battle against our common enemy. We fight for Mithral Hall, for Bruenor, for Wulfgar, for Regis, for Catti-brie, for Tarathiel, and for all the goodly folk. We fight the monstrous scourge of Obould and his evil minions.
At the end, I offered to my falling friends my love and my heart. Now I pledge to them my enduring friendship and my determination to live on in a manner that would make the dwarf king stare at me, his head tilted, his expression typically skeptical about some action or another of mine.
Durned elf, he will say often, as he looks down on me from Moradin's halls.
And I will hear him, and all the others, for they are with me always, no small part of Drizzt Do'Urden.
For as I begin to let go, I find that I hold them all the tighter, but in a way that will make me look up to the imagined halls of Moradin, to the whispered grumbling of a lost friend, and smile.
10. THE UNEXPECTED TURN
He heard a horn blow somewhere far back in the recesses of his mind, and the ground beneath him began to tremble. Shaken from Reverie, the elves' dreamlike, meditative state, Drizzt Do'Urden's lavender eyes popped open wide. In a movement that seemed as easy as that blink, the drow leaped up to his feet, hands instinctively going to the scimitars belted on each hip.
Around a boulder that served as a windbreak in their outdoor, ceilingless camp came Innovindil, quick-stepping.
Beneath their feet, the mountain itself trembled. Off to the side, Sunset pawed at the stone and snorted.
"The dwarves?" Innovindil asked.
"Let us hope it is the dwarves," Drizzt replied, for he didn't want to imagine the hellish destruction that rumbling might be causing to Clan Battlehammer if Obould's minions were the cause.
The two sprinted away, full speed down the side of the rocky