Change and more change... the constant of life.

Danica has returned to live with us, and little Elysian too. It is wonderful to have them back with us again. Danica has ever been like a sister to me, and though he never spoke of it, I always knew how Xan missed his son. Isolde has revelled in her big sister role once again. I admit that to see him raises once again my old regrets that I will never bear children of mine own. Much as I know this is not how to look at it. Ekysian himself is a little gift, as Issy is, and I am luckier than I can say to have them both with me.

Yes. There. That is how to see it. Not to grieve for what is not and what never will be.



And we have joined the Hidden. All three of us have beomce Steel's officers, to carry out his vision. It is a noble one. I hope I am worthy. Very much.

So very long once more until my thoughts have calmed enough once again for me to be able to commit them to paper. Xanthias once more returned to me, and threw my thoughts into such turmoil... I do not believe I have ever been so angry at a person in my life as I was to see him once more. Bitterly, bitterly angry...

He confessed to me that he had left because he felt responsible for my blindness. He told me that he had somehow feared that it was some kind of a judgement on me for loving him. I admit, this threw me into greater depths of anger. I did not know if I believed him. I was unsure if it was simply a flimsy excuse for being unable to cope with me as I was then, or whether he was telling thr truth. If so, I was even angrier with him, in a way. It was too close to some of the stupider and blacker thoughts I had had myself, from time to time. It was worse hearing them from another, and made me afraid that because of them I had failed another as he had failed me.

For he had failed me. He was not there when I needed him most. More than I could ever say to anyone.

I do understand his need to go back to the tombs of his family. They seem to him to live on in some way that is intimately bound up with the location of their bones. I udnerstand that he wishes to met go of their memory, and that of who he was...But he knew the pain... he should have known I needed him...

We exchanged many bitter words. I felt the anger swelling in me like a poisoned wound. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to realise what he had done to me. I told him of how I had come to be blind, how I had regained the memory. Some part of me watched with satisfaction as he went death-white as I told him matter-of-factly how I nearly perished in the maw of that ancient thing under the earth, and how I wandered close to death until Ildara found me and saved my life.

And yet the naked pain on his face hurt me too... And I wanted him. Even as I hurt him, even as the anger burned in me and itched and swelled, I wanted him still. And I hated myself the more for it. I could see only weakness in that desire. But nonetheless, for the first time, I let myself be angry at him. No carefulness, norestraint. i let him see all of me. Down to the hurt, the fury, the disgust in myself. I let it out. I let him see me. And I did not, in the end, entirely reject him. He came back to the cottage with me, though it was Danica's old bed he fell into and not mine own.

The next week was terrible. My thoughts swirled and clawed at me. I did not know what to do when he was in the cottage with me, and when he was out I was on edge, finding myself wondering where he was, what he was doing... What was worse in it's way was that Isolde greeted him with delight, threw herself into his arms. I had been angry at him for deserting her as much as I. Yet she took his return with delight only. I sometimes think that little one is too pure of soul to even feel such a thing as betrayal. She is so much sweeter than I, so pure by her nature. It made me feel only sourer, and loathe myself all the more for it. He went back to giving her the lessons in the sword he had began before he left, and I took the free time to hunt, fiercely.

I hoped for exhaustion. I had slept badly since I was cured. too long a dependance on the herbs for sleep I think, and with the turmoil of my thoughts... My sleep was interrupted often, and the dreams were bad. I began to wake in odd places, once kneeling by the fire, another time tangled in the bean vines in the garden, though I was sure I had barred the door before I slept. Hoping to exhaust msyelf more by researching in the library and my workshop, and to amuse Issy by showing her the new rooms revealed by the excavations, I took her to the Bunnies Clan Hall, and we spent a few nights there. Things came to a head when I wandered from my sleep in my workroom, where Issy and I were curled up on one of the beds, to wake in the arms of Xan in a dungeon I had never seen before, my face and hands covered in blood. He was frightened - he spoke of me wandering down talking of voices in the walls, not seeming to recognise him and scraping my skin raw trying to hear the voices. I can only think I was somehow walking in my sleep. I had never seen such a thing before. It would have gotten me killed on too many occasions. I stayed in the Guild hall, hoping that way at least I could be stopped form wandering off into danger and leaving Issy unprotected. She at least was not afeared. I think she slept through all my wanderings. And she loves the Guild Hall. She explores it as much as she can, and would be off entirely, I think, in the unexplored bits, if I did not keep a close eye on her.

In the end, of course, he came to find me even in the sanctuary of my workroom. So many stiff half-conversations that suddenly flared into life only when we bit off painful words at each other... I was weary. So weary it seemed to have seeped into my bones. But I was working when he came. Hoping for exhaustion. Hoping for sleep. He seemed half-shocked and half-saddened when he saw me. I told him of the deaths this place had seen in a raid while he was away, and he spoke suddenly that it hurt him to see me take such a burden alone. That he cared not for the mess in the workroom, but for that within me. That I had broken once and should not risk doing so again.

I was furious once more. I stiffly told him that I had not broken. I knew he meant the blindness... I let him know that no matter how terrible it had been, how much it and he had hurt me...I had survived it, as intact as I could ever be. Once more he looked stricken... and it hurt. I was so tired... I felt tears come to the surface suddebly, shamefully. I hid them in Isode's sleeping hair... but they left trails in the dirt on my cheeks. And fir a moment it seemed such folly to think that we could ever have anything of what I had thougth we once had. That we now could only hurt each other as the vestige of that...love? It seemed so...so very hard...

And then he apologised. For everything...just for everything. And so did I. I was so sick of hurting him...so sick of hurting myself. Words...so easy to speak, and they drive so very very deep, and stick like barbs... and it was so sweet simply to say sorry, and to hear him ask for it. So sweet to let go of that anger and that disgust, those swelling, hateful things. So sweet to let him see the weariness too...and for me to look at him afterwards and feel...something. For there to be something remaining between us once that had gone.

And the next words he spoke, softly, hesitantly, were to ask if I would sleep better were he with me in my bed.

I admit that I was stunned. And I felt an odd stirring of joy. Some, I admit, was that he could desire me still. That I had not become some dry and soured old woman full of hatred like bare broken bones and nothing else. And more joy that he truly and simply wanted to help me. That he still did care. For the look in his eyes. Nothing chancing, nor calculating. He could barely voice the words. He seemed to be almost holding his breath in suggesting them, as if afraid that I would turn on him once more. the hope and the fear in his eyes... He had abandoned that courtly mask of courtesy he had so often worn when he claimed he was baring his heart. All of a suden, it seemed to me that the prince was gone, and I could see only the man, with the awareness of his own failure of me in his eyes, and his wish to make amends heartbreakingly naked as he looked at me.

""Are...are you sure? That...that that is what you truly want?"

"I have been yours, since the day that you allowed me to be. Always my mind dwells on you. Why would I not want it? The question is, more importantly, do you truly want that?"

And I knew it was what I wanted. that he was what I wanted.

And if it is weakness to want him, to let myself love him, than I am weak. It cannot be less cold or less painful than strength.

I have white hairs.

I was sitting playing idly with my hair last night as I spoke with Tienchi in the Glass Tavern. I plucked them a little more sharply than I intended to and came out with a small bundle of them wrapped around my finger. Three strands were white amongst the copper.

I do not know how to feel about this. Even allowing most liberally for mistakes in my arithmetic, there is no way I can be more than two or three and twenty years of age, and I suspect I am younger.

I am most terribly afraid that one day I shall look in a mirror or a still pool and see my mother looking out at me. A woman bowed under with the sufferings of her life, of inconstant or dead men, pain and dearth all writ clear on her features. Do I look so old already? The pools in the forest are murky and I find I fear to go and ask Mistress Jaymes in the Glass Tavern for a look in her mirror...

Is it foolish of me to wish for youth a little longer, for beauty at all? To see my own relfection in a man's eyes and know that he sees something beautiful? Am I simply afraid that I have become pitiful, that the solicitation I see in others these days is simply that; pity?

Yes, it is foolish. I determine my own fate. I cannot be made pitiful or pathetic by others, but only by myself. And I will not be. No matter how others see me. I will not be.

On a rather kess self-pitying note, as I mentioned before I had an interesting conversation with Tienchi in the Glass Tavern. The more I meet the girl the more i like her, though I think I must make it a resolution not to apologise to her any more. When I do, she apologises to me, and the entire conversation becomes a cart hitting a bump in the road. I should rather we had gone on talking rather than allowed ourselves to be derailed thus. She sought my advice on whether the fire sipirts in the cavenrs below Dundee could be considered demonic. It seems she makes it a point of principle not to kill anything that is neither demonic nor undead. I was intrigued. I would have asked her straight why if I did not think there might be something she would rather not speak of behind it. It was refreshing to meet one who did not seem to wish to hack their way through all of Valorn;s fauna. At the same time, I do not know if it will last. I recall my own scruples when it came to hunting in the caves of the sea dwellers, but when I heard of the children they had supposedly stolen in raids on the costal villages and branishor, I found I could do so. I still regret slaying the centaurs, but not keeping the mountain paths open for caravans and wanderers, and I know I never slew on of those free horse-people who was not actively trying to kill me first. And the ogres? I never did find any conclusive trace of those boys in the village, but I did find human skulls, narrow rib bones like a child's, and weapons too small for ogre hands in their armoury. Do I regret that I slew those who barred my way out? Honestly, as befots a Cleric, I can say I do not. I would do it again.

I am...confused. Not an uncommon state of mind for me, but nonetheless that does not soften the sting of my thoughts churning once more.

I was cleaning out some of the general clutter that seems to have accumulated while my sight was lost, and tucked in a pile of books I had thrust away into a corner was... well, was a book, written neatly in Xanthias's hand. He must have left it the night he spent with me. I suppose it is a fair mercy he did not leave it on the pillow with his note to me, else I might have destroyed it as wantonly as I did that.

The book...the book was his journal. A collection of things written here and there, not near as dense nor as frequent, and nor, I fear, as foolishly as I commit my own thoughts to these unguarded pages. But nonetheless, they were his thoughts. At first I debated on whether to read them at all. It wa spossible he had simply let the book fall on his way out and it had become mised up with my possessions. He had been so weary when he came to me...it seemed I could feel his fatigue seeping through me from the touch of his hands. But I let my traitorous eyes fall on the last page, and found that my name was written simply on it, with "Heart" below. I took this as a sign that he had indeed left it for me. Perhaps he knew how I would treat the other missive. It still hurts me more deeply than I can say that he left without even waking me, when we was so weary and worn. I cannot help but think the sight of me blinded and lost in darkness horrified him beyond belief. Not only physically. I was never beautiful, and I had grown thinner and scrawnier in my blindness, but nothing irrperairable now that I am sound again. I already see the improvements in myself wrought by the simple fact of health. I recall Mylor's words, harsh but spoken, I think, from genuine belief, that he thought Xanthias decieved himself as to his feelings and intentions towards me. The book is, of course, nothing conclusive. I try to bring my mind purely to bear on this, as my heart and I...speak rarely and when we do the results seem oftimes disastrous for us both, and for others around us. Xan certainly writes of strong feelings for me. They were clearly written at different times and in different inks. He did not write the book all at once to decieve me deliberately, that much is clear. As for the rest... they sound genuine to me, as objectively as I can read them. He seems to write from such a foriegn land to me. As I read, I became reminded of the gulf between us in experience and class once more. He writes most guardedly of things that pertain to his family and the life he once led. Perhaps such a life trains you to keep your words guarded in case they fall into the hands of others. Perhaps he simply wrote as a reminder to evoke the memories once more within himself. And I lack the experience to fill them in... How much I lack it. How little I know. In this life, I make sense, and I fulfil a function. Even blind, I did so, though it near broke me. In that kind of life...I make no sense and fulfil no function. As ever, when I think of him I feel dizzy, as if I have lost the solid footing of myself. Is Mylor right? Does he decieve himself in thinking we could ever truly be together?

Once again, emotion makes me foolish and uncertain. Once more I lose my footing in myself. It is not so uncommon, as I said. I was a fool the other night. A new aquaintance recently has been Tienchi, a very friendly and likeable young woman with strong opinions and a streak of stubborness that I can see certain people comparing to my own. She did remind me a little of myself, lacking all the dead and scarred bits of myself that I cannot discard. that being so, we have already clashed once or twice. I can truly see where she is coming from. She, it seems, is another that Mylor has befriended, and it also seems that his despondant behaviour of late has not gone unntoiced. I chance-met both of them on the road betwixt Dundee and Milltown, and Tienchi manouvered us into Cerbie's, where Waterfall was on shift. They, it seemed, wished to confrint him about his behaviour. I...well, I admit to acting most foolishly there. I was angry. It seemed to me that they had acted to decieve my friend. The Gods know he has a right to his own personal life, which I will not write of in these pages. It seemed also to make me complicit. Anger kindled in me suddenly. it wa sonly later that I realised that it reminded me painfully of those women who would come round to my mother's house when I was but little more than a babe. A babe with no father, and her belly swelling with another child already. They spoke in voices of false commisseration, and urged her to tell them all, to mend her ways, sweetened their gossip-mongering with the hint of maybe forcing the man of the village who had so "disgraced" her to wed her... The last of those came after the babe was born still, and never drew breath. She insinuated that maybe it was a mercy it was so, and my mother... well, she turned her cold and empty eyes on her, and the woman seemed to shrink, and fled. And none of them ever crossed her threshold again.

Recalling that, I know there was nothing of that in Tienchi and Waterfall's intent. I know they truly care for Mylor, and wanted to aid him. As did he himself. He near drove me to hitting him by his relaxed and jokey comments while I was spewing forth anger on his behalf. It was stupid of me. I know my friend can take care of himself, better than I could I am sure. Once again I let my emotions run off and do foolish things. I am glad that on cooler reflection I seemed to make it up with both Tienchi and Waterfall. Thye are good people with good hearts, and I would never forgive myself had old angers from the past severed me from them forever.

The writing here is as clear as in its earliest pages, flowing in a clear black ink straight and true across the page.

I... dear Gods, I hardly know how to write this. So long, I was in too much despair to wish to commit my black thoughts to paper, and then... then it seemed to be tempting fate to do so. Finally, I take my pen back in my hand. Finally, I can see this page stretching before me, waiting for my words.

Yes. See. I can see again. The Gods are merciful.

I had reached my lowest ebb. After a night in my bed, Xan had disappeared once again, leaving a note on the pillow I could not read and I felt suddenly and terribly reluctant to put to other eyes and other lips. Instead, I crumpled it in my fist in a sudden fit of rage that brought tears like acid to my eyes, and threw it into the fire. After this, I felt sure he had finally abandoned me. I burned his words, and the rage drained from me suddenly as it had come, leaving only emptiness. I...gave up. I felt sure that the Gods had judged me wanting and I was lost in the darkness forever.

I did not give up entirely. At the bottom of my despair I found a sudden reserve of strength, bitter and hard and somehow unwholesome, but it would not let me lie down and abandon Issy and myself. I gave up on the charity of the Temple and went back to my cottage with my daughter, and between us and with the intermittent help of Mylor, Fleur, Roana and a few others we made it habitable again. this dull and bitter anger drove me, and then finally ceased to ache, leaving only the dullness behind. But I stood up again. I made a life for Issy and myself again. I even arranged with Shamson that he teach her to read and count, as my little one's quick mind made me sure that she would take to them, and I could no longer teach her myself. Aside from taking her to these lessons, I barely left the confines of my home and herb garden for some weeks, sustaining myself this way and seeing few. One day, however, I felt the old restlessness stir in me again, and, after I dropped Issy off at the gates of The Holy Temple, I found my steps leading me towards Dundee Inn . There I found Mylor. He greeted me warmly but there was an air of despondancy about him. He misses Llye... He loves Llye... still...

Being in such similar moods, we soon fell away from the cheery atnosphere of the inn and I ended up with his guiding hand on my arm through the dark forest. He led me by paths seldom trodden until we came to the old abandoned forest retreat of the Champions of the Red Road. We sat, for a long time, with spatterings of conversations, but mainly in what I suppose could be described as a companionable silence, if such a thing could be had when both participants are in some way despondant and despairing. Between us, tangible in that silence was...whatever it is that has made us friends so long, I suppose. Trust. The restless feeling continued in me, building up like an itch in my eyes until, somehow... I felt moved to remove the bandages. There had been only darkness behind them so long...when I turmed my face to the warmth coming through the treetops, the light struck into my eyes with such pain that I near screamed and hid my head in my hands. A note of hope, unfamilar and undisguised, came suddenly into Mylor's voice as he inquired what was wrong. The pain receded as he brought me a cloth soaked in cool water from the brook to lay over them. And at the sound of it in his voice suddenly hope rose in me once more, and by all the Gods that pain was worse than the blinding one of my eyes. I had grown used to despair. Despair was safe. Hope... Suddenly I was so full of it I was dizzy, and terrified. I clutched at his hand on my shoulder as if to prevent myself from falling away. He was oddly gentle as he asked me what I feared, reminded me that I had only to gain. I confessed...I confessed my fear of the pain,even should my sight return to me with it, though not...not entirely why. His disappointment with me seemed clear in his voice. "You could cover your eyes again to shield them from
that." "I could." "You're supposed to rail against that." His disappointment hurt me, more than I thought mere emotion still could. It struck me that without Xan... without Xan...aside from Issy, Mylor was the closest person to me in all of this land. My oldest friend. The last person I cared about disapointing. And even as I recognised it, I was glad. Without anyone's disapointment to care for, with only my own pride to prevent me falling al the way... that seemed lonlier than I could care to be, even for the sake of avoiding pain.

And in recognising that, I could speak. I let out some of my anger and confusion about Xan. How abandoned I felt, in my darkness. How I felt I could not blame him, though, for not saddling himself with a blind woman, or worse yet, a woman... a woman like me. How the shadow of what had happened to me seemed ever to have lain between us. How I hated myself for not overcoming it.

Mylor was silent a long while before he spoke. He seemed...reticent to speak. But I asked him. I felt I had heard my own thoughts too long. I needed to know...something from another. Soemthing that was not simply the echos of thoughts and more thoughts echoing around the labrynth of mine own head. He did as I asked, and spoke. "Okay. I think Xanthias was selfish and self-centered. He was used to women falling over him. You were different. He might have tricked himself into thinking he could stay with you forever. He loved you as much as was possible for him, but eventually he was too weak. He had to run away." He snorted, and I heard bitterness in his voice towards himself, as deep as there was in me. "I've stood in those shoes."

In it's own way, it was as thought a burden I did not know I had been carrying suddenly slipped from my shoulders. Mylor's words... I could not tell their truth. But even the thought that I may not have been entirely responsible for all the pain and anger in me now... it lifted a weight of a kind. Perhaps I had not driven him away. Perhaps if he had left me... the fault was in him, at least as much as in myself. Perhaps not. Mylor thought of himself and faithless, and he was the truest friend I ever had. Perhaps Xanthias also held faith with me, somewhere. And if not...perhaps I was not incapable of being loved. Perhaps it was his own scars as much as mine that drove him away from me.

I told Mylor as much. That I saw no faithlessness in him. That he was the truest friend I ever knew. And I thought I heard the bitterness in his voice ease just a little as he suddenly urged me to consider the Altar in the Temple of Light. The place where the God Darren had laid the blindness on me as a charge, and that I had avoided ever since. "Isn't it worth going there, just in case it matters?" and I told him...somehow I told him "I...do not want the God to see...to see how I have failed him...". There was surpise in his voice as he answered me "I don't see how you've failed in anything." And I heard my own voice answer "With all the gifts the Gods have given me, all the powers I possess...I am no more able to keep people from dying than I was when I was a healer with herbs and a knife. People keep dying...dying forever, cold in the earth. Cold as Mar is. All these gifts...and still I fail. I cannot even keep myself safe. I... still do not even truly know how this happened to me. I could have died and left Issy alone..."

Even as I spoke I knew the foolishness of my own words. Too much... foolishness and pride, of a kind. It was too much to take credit for. Had I really held myself guilty for all the deaths that passed through my hands? That passed through the world? Some part of me let go, in that moment, and I let Mylor take my arm and lead me to the Temple, where i could kneeel before the altar and beg forgiveness. The forgiveness that I, however foolishly, felt I needed. in that Holy Light, I opened my eyes, and in that moment of supreme pain, I asked the Gods to forgive me. For everything.

I felt myself begin to fall, and suddenly I was in a place that seemed all of light. I saw the shapes of the Gods, and the greater Light that shone through all of them, behind all things. Even as I stood there I knew I was forgiven. I felt all the compassion in the universe wash through me like a great tide. Though it was Darren that spoke to me, his voice seemed to be that of all the Gods, male and female in one. The voice told me how afraid I was of pain, and why. That I endured pain, great pain, terrible pain, willingly, and yet needlessly. Because I would not let myself feel it. Because as soon as I was confronted with it, I shut the door in my head that I had learned under torture by the demons. The one that said "This pain is not mine, It is happeneng to someone else, very far away." "You are afraid, child." the voice told me. "You are afraid that as you broke once under pain and screamed for your love, screamed for Mar, until it broke his heart, that you cannot trust yourself under pain again. You shut this pain away from yourself, by the herbs you took to deaden it, by shutting yourself away form your own feelings. Without the pain, there can be no healing. You had to come back to us, to feel the pain willingly."

The memory returned to me aslo, finally, of how I had lost my sight. I had been under the Wall, wanderign, lost in paths under the darkness. From a crack, a fresh crack deep in that darkness had come... a thing. Out of darkness it came, and it's very presence seemed to deaden the world, so that the light from my hammer and amulet and even my Ring seemed dimmed almost to nothingness. I fought it, alone, in the dark, and it hissed forth a vapour that seemed to make my head spin and slow my reactions, deaden my limbs like despair. But I fought it, Hewed at the hideous thing's limbs and soft underbelly. And finally, a great stinger came out a me. I almost fell victim to it, and if I had, I think I should never have left. It would ahve dragged me to its lair in the deep places of the world. I avoided it, but luck or good fortune...almost. As the stinger struck at me, I hewed the thing's head from its neck. Like a last revenge, the stinger than had been about to drive into my flesh sprayed everywhere as the thing screamed it's hideous dying scream... into my eyes. I breathed some in, and was sick. I crawled, lost in the bowels of the Wall, desperate for water, as the pain in my eyes mounted. Finally I came to the desert... and it already began to blur before my eyes. I was by then too sick to stand straight... I tottered and wandered far, no longer knowing where I was going...until eventually I stumbled into Ildara, and she healed me as best she could. Saved my life, most likely, judging by the delirium that was on me by that time...

All that passed for me in the instant between the Light hitting my eyes and the impact as I hit the sandy floor beneath the altar. I fainted from the pain and the shock...and I came round some time later looking up at Mylor's face, blurry and painful and true. My friend, who convinced me to do what I had to do, and thus gave me back my sight.

What...a...day...

It is truly said that life naturally leads one in endless circles. As a child, my mother taught me that in the end, all things became seen from all perspectives. Those who caused suffering would eventually feel that pain turned upon themsleves, those who killed would taste only of death. The child becomes the mother, the pupil becomes the teacher. The path leads to all places in the great road that is life.

However, I have never had this illustrated quite so literally as l did last night...

I was engaged in the proud and joyful task of initiating my dear friend Roana Moonwind into the profession of Cleric. She is, in my mind, perfectly suited to be my pupil, because, like I, she enters the profession not to be a nun, nor a holy warrior, not to legislate on temple matters or to wear shining armour and wield a great hammer in the names of the Gods, but to heal, to aid the sick and ease their suffering.

Thus. as we set off, our spirits were high. A visit to the Temple, the voyage to Branishor to kneel before the altar, a few impromptu mugs of ale with friends to celebrate... what could be a more pleasant prospect?

If only we had known.

Our first warning should have been the unexpected massing of creatures along the edges of the excavated road. I admit that in my current condition, I find the desert a difficult place to traverse. Sounds seem distorted by the shifting, whispering sands, and there are no hard surfaces to guide my with the taps of my staff. So as I cast back and forth searching for the hidden path, it seemed that Roana was massed by zombies and scorpian of all description. Time after time I came back to find her engaged in a battle to the death. They fled from me, but seemed to mass her every time I moved more than a few feet from her. Thus we were late for the first of the appointed times.

My girded ourselves against our disappointment and sat down to wait. The second time arrived, and we duly befit ourselves to petition to enter. Then...

No, I truly cannot write this... I cannot...it is too embarassing...

Cleric, honesty is demanded of you.

We got stuck in the door.

Yes. Both of us entered at the same moment. The perils of a blind sponsor become clearer now. Let all initiates who ever come to read this take notice.
Whatever the ingenuity of those ancient enchanters of the Golden Age, they evidently had never considered such a thing. The Temple spat us out in the most barren, featurless piece of desert imaginable. After wandering around in circles so long we missed yet the NEXT of the appointed times, with poor Roana beset every time I left her and I myself quite unable to find any reference point at all in the shifting sands, we were eventually rescued by the gallant Zal Windchaser. To my eternal embarassment...

Of course, in the end, the ceremony was most gracefully completed, and Roana stands proudly amongst the ranks of Valorn's Clerics. I knelt by her side as she recieved her Ring from the altar, and in the eye of the mind that still remains to me saw her shine brighter as she became who she was born to be. To my greatest honour. But I hope she could excuse me as, on going to the Inn at Milltown for the celenbratory drink, I pitched down full-length on the couch to fall into a deeper sleep than any drunken stupour. It had been a VERY long day...

I awoke this morn with the memory of a voice once dear to me singing a song I had forgotten. Perhaps it never really existed. once, long ago, I was wounded and weary and ended up sleeping while Steelthunder kept watch for me. In pain, I hovered for a long time ebtween waking and sleeping, hearing the whisper of wind and the movemnets of small things in the grass around us until gradually all of this became a dream, and I fell inot a sleep that was at that time the best I had had in what seemed longer than I could recall. I awoke, or though I awoke, equally gradually. Not the hair-trigger awareness learned as a soldier that meant I never truly slept, nor the heavy grogginess that generally affected me on the few occasions I ever did fully relax. This was like waking form one dream into another, one fadfing and becoming the other with no diminishing of beauty or of the feeling that I was safe. Absolutely, perfectly safe. And part of the beauty of that dream was a voice, deep and soft, singing a low and husky song that gradually coalesced into words that I could understand.

Firelight, pulsing bright
Burning in the hazy dusk of
Tomorrows forgotten promises.
I sit entranced as I watch the
Perfect dancing of the flickering
Flames, cherry red, glittering gold,
Streaked with shatters of the clearest
Tears, precious and passionate and whole.
Starlight, spiralling flight,
Whispering in the inky blackness
Of an elite night, ghostlike, intense
Strength housed within gentleness
And focus.
Therein lies Venus.

In the end, of course, the song ended, and some time after that, I moved, and the world coalesced around me, and Steel and I talked, and ate. and got up and walked together. And I have never known if this was a true memory or a dream. And now I know not, as I lie in my bed, the sheets smelling of sunlight and grass from being spread out to dry on the hillside, whether this was a dream I had once again, or a memory rising to the surface if my mind like a bubble in deep, still water. And then it comes to me that it does not matter.

The Light keep you, Steel, wherever you are. My thoughts ever go with thee.

I... this is an entry I have begun so many times, and then had to leave the page and put it aside for the pile of scrap paper I keep for Issy's first faltering efforts under Shamson's tuition. I am not even sure what to write... my thoughts tumble and swirl in my head like leaves on the wind.

Xan...Xanthias lives. He has returned to Valorn. To me. I...

The rest of the page is crumpled and shows marks of spotted ink and some writing heavily crossed out beneath.

Everything we are fighting for is trickling away from us...Like death by a thousand tiny cuts. I would rather the single stab and be done with it. Iso is dead. Malak is dead. I feel as if trapped in the nightmares of the past I once shivered and screamed in night after night. This is as it was before the very end in my own land. All who were once dear to me dying one by one, some at the enemy's hand, some at their own, and, weary as we have become, with more and more it becomes impossible to tell the difference.

I sit here with Issy asleep in my arms in my own bed in my own cottage, and all I feel is numb. The way one feels when the blow has been struck and the shock as yet outweighs the pain. Somewhere I sense yet underneath it all the pain, waiting for me, waiting for me back in its loving embrace. And now all I feel is numb.

Can I stay this way?

Mylor is all right. Thank the Light.