Long did I wander, away from the slow-healing of lingering aches, flinching from the memories that might have made them fresh again. When I stood again upon the streets of Dundee, it was as though my feet had wandered there of their own accord, like old habits learned in the days of my blindness. Quiet pangs of familiarity hung over everything, and yet the old wounds hurt far less than I expected when allowed my examination.

This old journal was one of them, tucked under the blankets back-stage, gathering dust amid everything else in a place that once made my heart sing sweet as a fledgling sparrow's readiness for flight.

I do not remember the ease of mind of my last journal entry. All memories of the before are of how Sunrifter dipped the horizon one evening, and when it next rose the world had changed in ways that I didn't know how to find the path of. And so the path led away. Away from the quiet pain, away from the inconsolable change, away from a facade of fineness that I had neither desire nor maturity to assume.

My path brought me back midst Summerfaire. In many ways, a soft-sung reprise of days long gone is what followed. Quiet stories in the shadows of Altitan. Bustling laughter and joy in the shadow of a guildhall. The strum of zither strings, for once in rare accompaniment. In some ways, I am sorry that my oldest and dearest audience weren't in attendance to that. Maybe I could have sung for them again, like I did so long ago, when I watched their eyes widen with surprise and delight, even as I surprised myself in ways. I can almost hear an utterance from the old days, a sure statement of unrepentant greed for 'Cennysong', as she sometimes called it.

I visited the tower where Viviyana and I went so long ago, green adventurers, when I still stalked guildhalls with voracious curiosity and flipped coins over professions. Those near-inseparable early moments are almost the clearest of memories to me. Gods, but if I could go back to the beginning, where the beauty of the soul of the world unfolded before me from the moment I stepped out of Jolan's and was whisked away on some adventure. Before the Gates of the Many. Before the Seige. Before Scooter, and Myna, and whispers in shadow, and the rallying cry upon Balthazar himself. All is a song fallen from lips that shan't ever speak them again, and any shallow telling would feel like a disservice.

In the end, I can't stay here. Not because it hurts too much, but because it doesn't hurt enough.

Better to keep the song. I shall not shun it anymore, but instead keep it in a hidden, private, quiet echoing cave deep within my heart, where I might chase it down with a rogue's nose for treasure hidden away when silent marcs grow too deafening.

I am sorry to those who I leave behind. I learned long ago, though, that bending too much in the winds of others wishes is a path that leaves one bereft, naked, and broody. Besides that, I think they will be okay, even if they do not yet know it. I have faith in them. I never lost that, amid everything I mourned.

I'll leave this journal here, I think. Take care of them, my blue friend, if it is you that finds it. You always had a fierceness and certainty in you that left me breathless. These young ones might need that, now. People who drift to such places as this never did do well alone.

I think I hear voices and laughter on the stage outside.

But perhaps that is only an echo.