The continent still bears the wound:
a place of tears, and storms, and sailors' cries,
the death-throes of a giant,
sired by inescapable will,
and nursed on sibling blood.

What are ten thousand lives,
when purpose burns in the vein?

History sings with what might have been,
had a village boy not heard the voices,
and stumbled, starving, from the trees,
armed with staff, and moss, and maddened gaze,
to plant the earth with uncertain hope.

I wonder - did that troubled soul stir,
when the black tide drowned his grave?

Did the God-King bid him witness,
the proof of his hard-sown faith?
Ages of wealth and forgotten music,
of might that ensured that none would wear chains.

In time, all giants topple,
and leave their lasting wounds.
His was felled, we know, through humble means:
the lure of power, the softness of ease.

Brave souls rose to challenge rot,
and in doing, brought resounding peace,
an ash-smothered silence,
that salt long kept from irreverent feet.

We lose ourselves in fractured memory,
of half-imagined, bright moments between.
But we forget more than that shining ideal ever knew;
we spin through the shards of worlds,
that cracked in our confident hands.

We can no longer look back and retrieve,
what we only yearn to be true.
We can only pave, stone by stone,
paths of Ambition that ready us all,
for a future no voice will betray.


Penned by my hand on the 24th of Sarapin, in the year 1000 AF.