Editing Chain of Regrets (section)

==From Within==

Our home has had many masters over the years, each as solitary and secretive a man as the one before.  The passage of ownership is sometimes the product of love, but more often, it is marked by blood.  When the former occurs, the old master and the new arrive together, the old guiding and protecting the new through the dangers that surround us.  When the latter, the new master arrives alone and must fight his way through the clutching, strangling vines of thorns, the quicksand traps, and the other pitfalls that have formed from the partial diversion of the manse's essence.  If he survives and bears the stone that grew from the heart of the cove, my sisters and I accept him as the new master.
 
I enjoy these transitions, one master flowing into the other, just as the pools of the Chain of Regrets connect via the small streams that pass between them.  Five years or five hundred, eventually ownership passes on to the one who needs it most.  In the meantime, we watch, we guard, we tend.  One day, the master will leave, and a new pool will form in the Chain to remember him by.  Soon after, the new master will come.  And we will do the same for him.

-- Salass, Naiad of the Chain of Regrets