C’est La Vie

Who did you lose? [...] I lost them all.

it's also interesting in the difference between the elves of the Old Path and the practitioners of other races. if the ability to have children was decided to only be granted to the most faithful then elves like Hannan and his wife were foregoing the possibility of ever passing on their traditions to their biological children as the other races of the Old Path could. of course, biological family isn't the only type of family, but it does mean the elven druids had to put themselves in more danger in order to find others who shared their beliefs. there were no generations of secret worship. they had to intentionally seek each other out just to learn about the Path, let alone find community with each other, and if they were discovered, if they confided in the wrong person, they were persecuted the most harshly by their goddess of life and nature.

We said 'flower-doll' not because that's how we saw you, but because it's what we knew she saw you as. An eternity, to have all of your complexity, all of your possibility, all of your dreams folded into an idyllic paradise where you would be punished for the most minor infraction?

What if the mortals had made her surrender instead? What answers could she have given them about the Barrowdells, out of love for her children? What precedents could she have changed, out of love for her children? In what ways could she have changed if given more of a chance, out of love for her children?

The answer is none, because she didn't love the elves. But she repeated and reinforced that message, "I love you, [name she knows]," to the same individuals for centuries and centuries. Those elves had centuries and centuries to internalize it in the face of any evidence to the contrary. Whosever womb they came from, Sylandri was their mother. They had no surnames to indicate parentage separate from her. They only existed because she allowed it.

GetUp Australia issue media statement on the National Press Club stunt: