Looking back, I suppose it was foolish of me to run away. I am a farmer, I have always been a farmer. I grew up knowing nothing of a city, instead I plowed fields and fed animals. Queldin always made fun of me for having dirty fingernails every night, even after I'd bathed... I always felt so dirty and nasty.

From time time I was about fourteen, when night would come, I would often sneak out of the house, walk through the fields, down the road... the moonlight led me to town, where I could go to the taverns and sing and dance with the others. Oh, it was a spectacular sight, to see us all enjoying ourselves, the men drinking their ale and clapping as the girls all danced.

My father didn't like that at all. He called me a floozy, said I was doing all I could to attract young men to take me away, and that he needed me to stay and keep after the fields. After a few months it became harder and harder to find ways out, he would give me more and more work, I would find myself exhausted, my hands dry and cracking from picking corn. I got out less and less. Queldin still managed to come see me every once in a while, and would help me finish my chores early enough to be able to manage to go out for a few hours. Being able to go to the taverns was such a joy for me. People always told me that my voice was like an angel's, that my songs could awaken what slept in the castle ruins.

I miss those days.

My father grew harsher as time passed. My mother had my younger brother to look after, who was barely two years old, so eventually I had to cook and look after the house as well. People visiting the farm would always ask me why I didn't come and sing, where I was in the evenings. I grew lonely. Queldin stopped visiting me. I felt like a slave, like a prisoner.

One day, when I was seventeen, father came home, very drunk.. he told me that I was useless, that the farm was failing, and it was all my fault. I hit him. I had never hit a person before in my life, and that day I struck him with all the anger and frustration that had been filling my soul for so many years. I looked down at my hand, which was swollen, and up at father's face, which was red from my handprint, and I saw him raising his fist to strike me.

I turned and ran, I ran for miles until I reached Queldin's house. I told him what happened. He wouldn't let me go alone, and said he would come with me.

We traveled, for what must have been a month, until we finally reached Stonegate. We were tired, we were hungry, we were dehydrated, we were homeless... but we were far, far away from Quessa.

Some nights, I still look out to the sky in the west, and I watch the sun set over the fields of Quessa. Sometimes I find myself so utterly homesick that I shed tears... until I notice the dirt under my nails, the dirt that I cannot free.

It is on nights like that - on nights like this - that I find myself at an utter loss as to what to do with my life. I still do sing, or I try to.. but when one is hungry and cold, there is a certain something that their song lacks.

Sometimes I wonder, maybe I should just go back to farming.