If I Had Known
If I had known. If I had known then what I know now, that night would have been very different. Worse for that family. Better for me. I remember it well. Everything about our last fight reminded me of that night. The night I met the man who in just over twenty years of war would kill me and destroy what I had built for three centuries. Oh, how I remember it. Things would have been so different. So much better. It was raining that night, but I didn’t get wet. I was waiting at the door of the tiny house after knocking softly and politely. As I waited, I heard quick footsteps and murmurs, as if they were preparing or hiding something before opening the door. I didn’t care. How could I? There was nothing that this family could hide or show me that would surprise me. While I waited for their goodwill and obligation to welcome me into their miserable residence, I distracted myself with the surroundings. The house was located near a sea cliff. The waves crashed against the rocky walls continuously, without stopping. Their sound was only muffled by the rain.Everywhere I looked, except for the ocean, there were irregular fields of short grass, as if that ground were covered by a thin green carpet. Next to the house, a huge tree, whose trunk would still take years to begin to push through its walls. Its crown was even larger, umbelliform in shape, and with its monstrous size, it served as an umbrella for the house in it East side, and, at that moment, for me.I won’t lie, it was a calm land. It brought me tranquility. That’s why I chose that place for Olesis to live. I wanted the person who helped me to live in peace. It was the most I could do for a human like him, even for what he did for me. In a government like mine, gratitude cannot be confused with kindness. The footsteps inside the house slowed. They were both in the room just inside the door in front of me. They seemed to be preparing to let me in, as if they had a choice.I smiled slightly. It felt good to know that my presence had caused such desperate preparation. They were afraid of me, and I liked it. I knew I wouldn’t do them any harm, but the fact that they knew I could, even without reason, and feared me for it amused me. I couldn’t ruin that. They whispered about how they would welcome me. Poor things, if they knew how much I didn’t care. As I waited, the darkness of the night was broken by a flash of lightning that lit up the east. My peripheral vision noticed something, something that hadn’t been there the last time I’d come. I turned my head to the right, and saw it. A swing. Pretty basic, a plank hanging by two rough ropes from one of the branches of the tree. It wasn’t anything special, but it was something different, something new, something that surprised me. I liked it. I was about to start thinking about that swing, it would be the most exciting thing I would do in months, when the door opened, interrupting me.“King Maliris,” Olesis, the father of the family greeted me with a fearful smile as he held the humble door. He looked up to look into my eyes, or where he thought they were. I was hooded and the lack of light outside did not allow the human to see my face.“Hello, Olesis, my friend,” I greeted him calmly. He seemed to tremble a little at the sound of my voice. “I thought you were sleeping. I’m sorry if I woke you.”“No need to apologize,” he said with an evasive voice and look. My apologizing to him bothered him. “We just weren’t expecting your visit today.”“And no one else’s, I imagine,” I said, looking away into the house. Nothing out of the ordinary. “May I come in?”“Of course, I’m sorry,” he said as if my question had awakened him from his fear. “Please, make yourself at home. The house is yours.” That much he could be sure of.He said as he stepped out of the way, still holding the door for me to pass through.“Excuse me,” I said, entering the house with the top of my head scraping the opening.“I’m sorry, King Maliris,” Olesis said, starting to get slightly desperate. If I didn’t stop him, he would start begging on his knees.“It’s okay,” I said, calming him down. “You built your house thinking of yourself and your family, there’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, I’m just a visitor. And visitors, when invited, have no right to complain about the residence that welcomed them.”No one in that family was taller than six feet, and the doorway was almost seven feet wide. My “favorite” children had to duck to get through if they didn’t want to destroy part of the wall that their heads would pass through.I removed my hood, freeing my pointy ears to breathe outside the stifling air. Olesis, after closing the door, quickly approached.“Please let me keep your cloak, King Maliris,” he said, already pulling it away from my body.“Thank you,” I thanked him, while my long, straight orange hair hung down my back. The house was no higher than that floor. The entrance room I was in was both a living room and a kitchen. It would only take me three or four steps to go from one side to the other. Absolutely different from the palaces I lived in. On the other side of the room, which anyone could see directly upon entering the house, was a very dark hallway. There were candles on the walls of the hallway, but they didn’t light them. They limited the light in the house to the entrance hall where I was, as if that were the limit. I didn’t mind. A human