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From a high ridge east of Keeper's Dale, I watched the giants con-struct their massive battering ram. I watched the ores practice their tactics—tight lines and sudden charges. I heard the awful cheering, the bloodthirsty calls for dwarf blood and dwarf heads, the feral screams of battle lust. From that same ridge, I watched the huge ram pulled back by a line of giants, then let loose to swing hard and fast at the base of the mountain on which I stood, at the metal doorway shell of Mithral Hall. The ground beneath my feet shuddered. The booming sound vibrated in the air. They pulled it back and let fly again and again. Then the shouts filled the air, and the wild charge was on. I stood there on that ridge, Innovindil beside me, and I knew that my friends, Bruenor s kin, were battling for their homeland and for their very lives right below me. And I could do nothing. I realized then, in that awful moment, that I should be in there with the dwarves, killing ores until at last I, too, was cut down. I realized then, in that awful moment, that my decisions of the last few tendays, formed in anger and even more in fear, betrayed the trust of the friendship that Bruenor and I had always held. Soon after—too soon!—the mountainside quieted. The battle ended. To my horror, I came to see that the ores had won the day, that they had gained a foothold inside Mithral Hall. They had driven the dwarves from the entry hall at least. I took some comfort in the fact that the bulk of the ore force remained outside the broken door, continuing their work in Keeper's Dale. Nor had many giants gone in. Bruenor s kin were not being swept away; likely, they had sur-rendered the wider entry halls for the more defensible areas in the tighter tunnels. That sense of hope did not wash away my guilt, however. In my heart I understood that I should have gone back to Mithral Hall, to stand with the dwarves who for so long had treated me as one of their own. Innovindil would hear nothing of it, though. She reminded me that I had not, had never, fled the battle for Mithral Hall. Obould's son was dead because of my decision, and many ores had been turned back to their holes in the Spine of the World because of my-of our, Innovindil, Tarathiel and myself-work in the north. It is difficult to realize that you cannot win every battle for every friend. It is difficult to understand and accept your own limitations, and with them, the recognition that while you try to do the best you can, it will often prove inadequate. And so it was then and there, on that mountainside watching the battle, in that moment when all seemed darkest, that I began to accept the loss of Bruenor and the others. Oh, the hole in my heart did not close. It never will. I know and accept that. But what I let go then-was my own guilt at witnessing the fall of a friend, my own guilt at not having been there to help him, or there to hold his hand in the end. Most of us will know loss in our lives. For an elf, drow or moon, wild or avariel, who will see centuries of life, this is unavoidable—a parent, a friend, a brother, a lover, a child even. Profound pain is often die unavoidable reality of conscious existence. How less tolerable that loss will be if we compound it internally with a sense of guilt. Guilt. It is the easiest of feelings to conjure, and the most insidious. It is rooted in the selfishness of individuality, though for goodly folks, it usually finds its source in the suffering of others. What I understand now, as never before, is that guilt is not the driving force behind responsibility. If we act in a goodly way because we are afraid of how we will feel if we do not, then we have not truly come to separate the concept of right and wrong. For there is a level above that, an understanding of community, friendship, and loyalty. I do not choose to stand beside Bruenor or any other friend to allevi-ate guilt. I do so because in that, and in their reciprocal friendship, we are both the stronger and the better. Our lives become worth so much more. I learned that one awful day, standing on a cold mountain stone watching monsters crash through the door of a place that had long been my home. I miss Bruenor and Wulfgar and Regis and Catti-brie. My heart bleeds for them and yearns for them every minute of every day. But I accept the loss and bear no personal burden for it beyond my own emptiness. I did not turn from my friends in their hour of need, though I could not be as close to them as I would desire. From across that ravine when Withegroo's tower fell, when Bruenor Battlehammer tumbled from on high, I offered to him all that I could: my love and my heart. And now I will go on, Innovindil at my side, and continue our battle against our common enemy. We fight for Mithral Hall, for Bruenor, for Wulfgar, for Regis, for Catti-brie, for Tarathiel, and for all the goodly folk. We fight the monstrous scourge of Obould and his evil minions. At the end, I offered to my falling friends my love and my heart. Now I pledge to them my enduring friendship and my determination to live on in a manner that would make the dwarf king stare at me. His head tilted, his expression typically skeptical about some action or another of mine. "Durned elf," he will say often, as he looks down on me from Moradin's halls. And I will hear him, and all the others, for they are with me always, no small part of Drizzt Do'Urden. For as I begin to let go, I find that I hold them all the tighter, but in a way that will make me look up to the imagined halls of MoradiiL to the whispered grumbling of a lost friend, and smile. —Drizzt Do'Urden