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[TheHopscotch]

"All we can see is a shadow,

Cast by that which we do not see."

2133 AC.

Esshar.

"I can still remember what the world was like before I truly began living.

Within Rhoynish lands my hands still shake at the idea of returning to their homes, to where I was born. The looks of vile hatred my mother received were unlike anything I have ever seen before, the contemptuous gazes of mankind acting as though a woman providing for her child? Was somehow an act against the heavens themselves.

I can still recall the stones both men and women threw at my mother and I, no care within their eyes. No more than a young child, yet they screamed for us to leave and insisted that I would bring ruin and rot to their village. That I would bring about punishment upon all of them, that my birth alone was an affront to everything they had ever held close.

People are... Quick to turn upon one another, I've quickly come to notice during my time alive. Just a single mistake can have you branded as a traitor, being hung by the very people you once called your friends. Even should you scream and shout, insisting that you have done no wrong? Even as a child cries and begs and pleads for the life of their mother?

Nothing changes.

I can barely put a name to the faces which have wronged me at this point. The lands which I once called my home ravaged and ransacked by war and famine. For quite some time I was blamed for these actions, chained to the outskirts of town and left as an offering for arriving forces. No more than a young boy at this point, without mother and father.

It was there I waited.

And waited.

And waited. . .

Until the sound of galloping war horses approached the only world I had ever known...

Ah...

Our ride to Aen has just arrived.

Let's continue this little story of mine another time, shall we?

Come, come! We have a ship to catch!"