Nearly the first couple of years post-withdraw were hard, but I managed. Learned of the safest places to forage for resources, gave my home better flooring, fixed up the burrow with amenities I built myself, things like that. The loneliness did get to me at times, but then I reminded myself why I was alone and felt fine afterwards.

One day, I was leaving home to forage for more food. I put on my enviro-suit, moved the trapdoor, climbed up to first check my surroundings, and there he was. Caught off-guard from my coming up from underground, your pa was staring at me, scared, cold, and didn’t know what to do next. Under the layers of rags he wore, I saw his eyes and they were glowing like mine. Right then I knew he wasn’t an ordinary human, but one that had his genes spliced for manufacturing juggurog.

Upon this realization, sobriety meant nothing, and I tried snatching him up without a thought. I forgot how our planet’s gravity effected some human physical abilities, because he effectively evaded my grab with a quick leap out of my way. Running and jumping away was how he was able to avoid me as I gave chase through the snow. I momentarily got him when I lunged and grabbed him trapped on a ledge, but we regrettably found out the ledge was too weak to handle us both and it gave way. I regained consciousness in a snowbank at the bottom of the fall and noticed I lost my grip of him. He was busy taunting and laughing at me as he trudged away, which was perfect since it made him unaware of my hand coming down on top of him.

When I got back to the burrow, I tethered him by his leg to the floor while he was still unconscious. I looked around for materials around the home I’ve heard could be used to finish turning the gene-spliced into powder or ashes. I would’ve been happy to have even ashes to huff, despite ashes leaving a charred aftertaste and not being as potent. Then I thought to myself, would I be happy using again? I would’ve loved to experience that high once more, and I wouldn’t have cared if I died freezing to death in the snow. I missed the high because it made me feel like everything would be all right but once it faded away, the disappointment seeing that nothing had changed felt unbearable to the point where I would want to huff some more. While staring intensively at your pa, he woke up, panicked when he saw me, and tried to flee but the tether was stopping him from going anywhere. I grabbed him while he still struggled to get away, and as I held him, I expected to feel something. Instead, I felt nothing. No happiness, anxiousness, sadness, anger, no urges of any type, nothing. The only thing I felt was emptiness. I let go of him and he pressed himself up against the wall out of fear and confusion, watching me the entire time.

I was going to toss him out back into the wild, but whether it was from subconscious creeping feelings of loneliness, a break in my psyche, or something else, I began arguing with myself aloud as I paced around. On one hand, I wasn’t interested in juggurog anymore, so I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. Not to mention, I still didn’t like humans, and keeping one would mean I would have to take care of it. On the other hand, I remembered back when I was living in Esarc looking at how-to manuals on training humans, with one on foraging for different types of edible fungus inside animal dens. Instead of having to spend hours collecting enough moss and algae to last me for two to two and a half days, a few dens in the same amount of time would supply me with enough food for seven, with maybe a little left over to start my own garden. I thought it over until I looked in my stores and was reminded by their scarcity of food.

Next day, I moved the tether from around your father’s leg to his waist and we visited the closest den. I sent him inside the hole with a sack and stood by, waiting to feel for a strong tug on the tether. Soon as I did, I pulled him out and killed the den’s creatures trying to eat him. Their name escapes me at the moment, but you’ve seen them before with their ten legs and vertical jaws. He almost got eaten twice in that same hole that day. After we took care of them, he harvested the crop, which was enough to feed me for four days. I got what I wanted, so I broke parts off the dead creatures and fed him.

When we returned home as it got closer to midday, I tied his tether to the floor and he fell asleep, which is normal for humans to do so twice a day. Nonetheless, while eating my lunch, I got startled by his screams of terror. He appeared to still be sleeping on the floor, but he was screaming, kicking, and flailing his arms around violently, like he was trying to fight off something. I didn’t care what it was all about, I wanted him to stop making so much noise. I shook your pa awake with my finger and he jumped up and cowered in the corner, breathing quickly and heavily. His eyes were wide open, and he was looking around. I tried poking him again to make sure he was fully awake, and he swatted at me before covering his head with his arms, and then began rocking back and forth. Satisfied, I spent the rest of the day starting what would become my new garden. He was back asleep when I checked on him again later.

As time went on, I didn’t have to venture outside as often, except when more foraging was needed, which meant I took your pa along so I could use him when certain tasks required smaller hands. Eventually, we started talking at each other. I say “at,” because we mostly had no idea what the other was saying, but it was nice to hear another voice than your own. We found other ways to understand one another, like when he would tap me to get my attention, which saved us from trouble a few times. Sometimes, he would break out into a random song, which didn’t really mean anything except more to indicate that he was in a good mood. There was that one time when he messed on the floor, because he was tired of being sent out into the snow to relieve himself. I felt like crushing him for that but we both knew we grew to depend on one another. So, I got over it and ended up digging out a small deep privy for him.

Unfortunately, your father’s bad dreams ultimately persisted almost daily. For the most part, he would quietly talk or lightly kick and punch in his sleep, but sometimes it would be as violent and loud as the first one I witnessed. I started to feel something for his struggle and wanted to see what I could do to help. My first attempt involved washing and grooming him. He didn’t talk at me for a day afterwards, but his fair-skinned face wasn’t obscured with hair by the time I finished. The dreams continued. My second attempt was long overdue, as I untied him from his tether. When I did, I wasn’t sure what would happen, if he would try and find a way to leave or anything. I certainly didn’t expect a ‘thank you,’ since I was the one who held him against his will. Instead, he explored the rest of the burrow and that was it. Bad dreams still happened. After that, I wanted to try and approach this issue akin to how I kept myself from obsessing over my next huff in the past, even though it worked only temporarily. I taught him how to craft, fight, and how to speak my language, all to keep his mind occupied and maybe one day discover the root of the problem. It worked somewhat since the dreams seemed to occur every other night then.

One night, we were sitting across from one another eating dinner, when I asked your pa what he dreams about that would make him so violent while sleeping. He was confused about the question until after some clarification on my part. Hesitant at first, he told me that all the dreams were of him reliving his earliest and deepest traumatic memory, which he has no recollection of anyone or anything prior to it.

I remember because it was recalled in such vivid and disturbing detail. You father recalled being naked, strapped to an operating table in the middle of a room. He was gagged, his head tightly locked in place, and eyes pried open, while humans wearing long white robes and examination goggles surrounded him. He had finished being electrocuted, when they all looked up to the ceiling where there was none, only a darkness that was occupied by a minare watching everything. With a nod of approval from their observer, the humans stuck big, thick needles attached to tubing into your pa’s arms and legs, connected to a pump-like machine attached to a large container filled with minare blood. Meanwhile, one of these humans prepared a large three-pointed contraption that was connected to the machine and hanging over the operating table; one aimed over the heart, and one aimed over each of the eyes. When they were ready, one of the humans twisted a valve and pressed a button. Your father felt his blood being pulled from his body, and he saw it and the minare blood drain into the pump-like machine. The other humans flipped different switches as what appeared to be a fusion of both types of blood fill the apparatus overhead. He started losing consciousness from blood loss when a human pulled a lever, penetrating the heart syringe into his chest, waking him up to so much pain that he couldn’t scream even if he wasn’t gagged. It felt like he was being torn apart and burned from the inside as the fusion flowed into his system. All your pa could do was choke in agony before the syringe-like needles of the apparatus above plunged themselves into his eyes. Next thing he remembered was waking up blind with his eyes, arms, and legs bandaged, in a cage with other gene-spliced like him, in a lab with many others in a similar situation, waiting their turn to be crushed and dehydrated one by one. Like him, no one else there remembered anything from their personal lives before the operating table, not even their own names. It still sickens me to my stomach, knowing that each huff I took was a person who went through that same horrifying process, which was far worse than I could’ve ever imagined. I was going to do the same to your pa out of pure desperation for a high, and it sickens me now.

Lucky for him, it wasn’t long after when a rival Minare gang raided the lab, causing the cages to get knocked over and busted open during the fighting. He and a bunch of others made a break for a broken drain to escape to the outside. Most drowned by the strong current of the rushing water, and the ones left alive were attacked soon after by ordinary humans who spotted them recuperating on the embankment. Your father was the only one to survive the full ordeal, but he developed a fear of the Minare and other humans. He travelled around as a skittish pariah, living off whatever the environment he was in had to offer at that time. He gradually moved his way to the snowy Higherlands where he ran into me.

I gave him a sincere and long overdue apology for enslaving him. It didn’t matter if he went through such horrors or not, what I did to him, what I helped perpetuate through the trade, was monstrous and evil. He and his kind were forever scarred in many ways, and I was one of many responsible because I couldn’t get over my own self-loathing. He was confused, not about what I said as this time he understood, but about why I had that feeling towards myself.

I told him about my own life, and by the end I teared up, admitting sometimes the memory of my family's death weighed on me so much, that I wished I had something to wipe them completely from my mind. He angrily told me to never wish that and said the memories of losing a loved one is painful because it is accompanied by the best memories you have of them. Tearfully, he admits that since escaping the lab, having known nobody else for so long and no memory of loved ones to remind him of who he really is, it gave him nothing but a void that trauma filled readily. It eased when he headed for the Higherlands since it gave him the feeling of purpose, which he would then celebrate by finally giving himself a name. Once he achieved that goal, he didn’t find the solace he thought he would find. He then walked up to me, placed his hand on mine, and told me though I made some terrible choices in my life, the death of my family was never my choice and was never my fault.

That was when I broke down crying. After calming down a little, I picked him up and gave him a light hug to my face, which he whole-heartedly returned. We looked into each other’s eyes as we wiped away our tears. We were both people broken by the world, I had become cruel and callous, he had become a receptacle for my unkindness and exploitation. At that moment, we realized we were looking at someone new. No more slaves, no more masters, we were partners ready to rebel against the roles the world expected of us. There was no one to prove to, or stop us, but ourselves. We had only ourselves, and we shared a strong underlying attraction for some time, so that night we showed our true feelings towards one another. It started off with some difficulty due to our differences in size and anatomy, like how I accidentally sucked your pa’s head into my mouth, but we adjusted accordingly. Throughout the rest of the night after your conception, we laid bare, his body on mine, and we talked until we fell asleep. I think it was the best sleep we both ever had in memory.

Next day, he decided to give himself the name, Grimm. As my pregnancy developed, it quickly became apparent that we had to live somewhere with much more resources available to us, so we packed the essentials and left for the wild plains of the Middlelands. We settled on constructing a hillside dugout dwelling, and eventually it was where I gave birth to a beautiful pair of twins. Since then, your father’s nightmares all but completely stopped. You both were the result of us finding the good the universe had to offer. He doesn’t resent you, blame you in any way, or doesn’t care about you anymore. Your brother’s death is the first loved one your father has ever lost in memory, and it was too much for him to think rationally about.

You were the responsible one when it came between you and Drohh. You looked out for him, like I know you will do with yourself on your journey. I know your father feels the same when I wish you a great life on Erth. Don’t forget us.

Love always,

Ma