Prompt 7.1: What’s the worst pain you’ve ever felt?

There are those who think that because we Unseelie deal in those things which are dark parts of the Soul that we cannot or do not feel pain. Let me assure you, pain, sorrow, regret and grief are things that we experience at a level that is just as great if not more than that which other creatures or other kinds of being do.

Make no mistake, I felt that deep sense of loss and grief at the loss of my mother, and when I had to give up my firstborn daughter, Maeve, four days after her birth in order to save both of our lives. I wept bitterly for my Anam Cara on the dark day that I heard of the loss of his precious daughter, Danika Hsu. I have felt the pain of loss over many in the centuries of my life, but none greater nor more dear than when I lost my husband, Sebastien.

When you are married as we were married, the two that become one is more than just a quaint, religious metaphor. Such a loss is an amputation, a gut-wrenching event that turns even the smallest thing into the most significant reminder that a great part of you is now gone. Because Sebastien and I were wedded by the Soul as is Sidhe custom for one’s Consort, the loss was magnified many times over. For nearly a year, I barely spoke and for more than four hundred more years I would try to bring him back from the Realm of the Dead. Each failure caused the pain of his loss to reverberate once more. I was often asked, even by those closest to me, why I bothered, why I did not simply give up. Failure and defeat were not an option and although I would often be found having cried myself to sleep by his sarcophagus, I would not stop trying. I couldn’t. The pain of that loss would resonate both within and without until I succeeded. Pain that tears at your psyche and each nerve ending like invisible knives being wielded by relentless creatures that neither let you sleep nor find true solace in anyone or anything else. The pain is relentless and even the idea of death beckons like an almost irresistible lover.

Only our daughter, Caroline, kept me grounded and reminded of that love. At any rate, I do not believe I could ever live through something like that again.