Chapter Four: A New World and the Rising Darkness
They left two days later, after Raven had shared a tearful goodbye with the woman that had raised him. In truth, he wasn't really sure how he should feel about any of it, after all, she was still his mother, she had raised him, she had cared for him, she had even saved his life before he had truly had one. But things had changed between them and they both knew it. While she would perhaps always be 'Mom', that title seemed somehow skewed or off balance whenever he had used it after he had found out the truth. His thoughts inevitably ventured back to the mother who had exchanged her life for his and that was shading an all important word with mixed feelings. On top of everything else, he was having a hard time assimilating his latest shock. Raven's thoughts were dwelling on the mother he would never meet, the father he would never know, and his newly discovered sister. In its' own way, this was far harder to take in than the realization that Sione, the woman he had loved all his life, was LeShana. He had known Sione for the whole of his days, but Sarath was completely new to him. There was no doubting that she was his sister. Although she only vaguely looked like him, he could still see the best aspects of his own face in hers, once he knew to look for them. Sarath had at least suspected that out there somewhere she might have a brother or sister, but Raven had always believed that he knew who his siblings were. It was all very confusing and all very wonderful and terrible at the same time.
In the strangest of fashions, it almost seemed that all the dreams conjured up during the awkward years of teenage angst had come true. He had met a woman that would love him without price or conditions, the man he considered his mortal enemy and bereft of human decency was not his true father, and the world that he had always felt at odds with was not his true home. Even at the gates of adulthood, Raven had clung to many of those beliefs as some sort of last ditch effort to keep the world from stealing away a piece of his soul. It all come, in many ways, as a revelation, answering all the questions that plagued him since he was thirteen; why he and his brother had looked nothing alike. Why he had felt no kinship with any of his supposed family members, other than his mother. Why he had demonstrated gifts that his brother had not. Why he had nothing in common with anyone else who he was supposed to be related to. Raven would miss his mother, and Simon, but somehow it made his move easier. But having all his youthful dreams realized in a matter of days was still not easy, not when their was so much pain behind them, and the death of his birth mother laid most heavily on his heart.