Serith

Bio:

BIOGRAPHY:

An Eandroth, as I am, begins life completely ruled by their hormones. For the first five years of my life, I grew quickly. It was an idyllic time, my childhood, filled with play and learning. On my six birthday something changed in me.

I felt the drive within me build as the sun rose into the sky. What had once been my compatriots and friends were now my rivals. I found myself driven to best them so that I might propagate my genes.

By the time I came back to myself I was a man and would never be the same again. I’d killed fourteen others in order to mate. Their blood still calls out to me.

Twice a year the drive took me, removing all control from me. It stole my reason leaving me nothing but a rutting animal. I hated myself. I hated the females who taunted me. Everything about this world was wrong to me.

The longer I lived, the more I disliked myself. The longer I lived, the greater my pain. Not physical pain, but emotional.

The rage built inside me, following the biological imperatives of my race. Then, one day, I could not stand the sight of my fellows. All that could help me was eating, and I ate to drown out the hate that I felt toward the members of my tribe.

I put on muscle and height. It wasn’t long before I realized what had happened. I’d become a rogue. The hate I felt for what my own races had done to me, the emotion of it all, told me that I would need to leave if I didn’t plan on killing every one of my tribe.

I left.

The pain in my heart from the many I’d killed during my life weighed down upon me. I thought, briefly, of ending my life. It wasn’t serious, but it did make me think. I needed peace.

The exact path that my journey took was long and circuitous. I was half dead and delirious when I stumbled into Shandala.

It was years before they accepted me into training, and years more before I was ready to venture forth, but I had mastered the beast within, at least to a degree.
*
It still yearns to break forth and destroy…is that what you want to hear?

The more fool you.

Expectations are such that you will always be surprised when reality sets in. Reality has a nice way of destroying our expectations.

I began writing my journal when I was but a novice in the order. I thought it would give me clarity in my journey to dwell upon the past and to record it in its entirety. I thought it would help to express these feelings in print.

This was an erroneous thought.

I have since come to realize that it is not the expression of feelings that causes them to change but the control over those same feelings.

My Silonar, Ood, is capable of expressing his feelings. If I wish to be a simple beast, then I could be just like Ood. I choose to be other than a simple beast.

This is not to say that emotion does not have its place. Anger channeled in battle can lead you out the other side. It is not what emotions you have that is the problem, but which emotions rule you.
*
I found this journal upon my most recent return to Shandala. The leather cover was cracked and the print faded. It has been lying in an unused room for more than twenty years. As the youth was foolish, so was the adult.

I am still one who considers himself foolish. I look at the mayfly existences of those around me in this monastery and sigh. They only begin on the road to true wisdom and then they burn out.

My life is a dichotomy of the fast and the slow. So quick to reproductive maturity. So slow to mental maturity. So quick to leave my people. So slow to realize I was the problem.

It was my friend and fellow novice, now ancient by human terms, that really brought home how slow I was to mature.

He is a Master of our Art. Fifty three years old. In the thirty-eight years since we first donned the Gi he has become a man to be revered in the monastery, and I am still barely an apprentice.

I think it is time that I truly began to live. I go to pray in the temple of my god for guidance into what I should do next.