I sat in that cart for hours, wondering just how far away the other coast really was. Apparently, it was a long ways off – if I wanted to go anywhere fun, I'd have to make the trek. It was that, or head for the glaciers westward. As long as I helped load and offload barrels and boxes, the jockey (whose face and name I never learned) was fine with me staying – but I wasn't given a room to sleep in, and my food was whatever his horse didn't eat. At night, I had plenty of time to myself, so I chose to write about what had happened to me before I worked for The Fielder. A stretch of time I feared I'd need to ignore, to make my story beat with your hearts, oh dear Readers. Now I think I might as well, so you can understand who I am, and just what the hell I come from, that's made me this way – and why I'd rather skip town than ever go back too soon.

I wasn't actually born in the house I grew up in, and I've ne'er actually met my birth parents. I know, I called a man 'my father' and a woman 'my mother'. I'll continue to do so, for they were that to me, while they walked. I was never told where I came from – only that as an infant, I was left in the care of a Surgeon and a Teacher. As I grew, I realized I had trouble memorizing their faces. Nor could I recall those of my siblings, some close and some distant by blood, yet not one of them known to me by visage. I often mistook strangers for my parents, and my parents for strangers. Then they, the strangers, would yell at me, 'get back! Be off, now!', and I'd be scared until I was found by my family again. It wasn't that I couldn't see what they looked like, but that I couldn't recall to whom that image belonged.
The Surgeon called my condition, at least physically: "a dumbness of the mind".
But I wasn't dumb! I've been caught, when something interested me, to stand so long to read that I couldn't get up the next day. A particularly fine-printed series of parchments, posted in The Potionist's study, had done that for me – shown me I could withstand the pain, if I looked away from it. The Potionist was a friend of my father's, and those parchments were useful pieces of advice as to what made a story good. An Eastern Asian himself, with a handsome face, blueish eyes, and soft brown hair, I was never quite certain what he'd been mixed with. Only that he fascinated me. He took the craft of stories VERY seriously, and as he was only seven years older than I was, provided someone much more exciting to learn from than (no offense) my drier-than-sand Mentor. He suffered a condition that made him unable to read as fast as I could, for the words would jumble about in his eyes. So I read them aloud, which helped me practice my vocality. I learned more than I knew was possible to be said on the matter of a good, long story: it had to be general to its audiences, and yet meaningful enough to wake them; it must cycle through light and dark, with periods of rest and danger, adventure and sentiment, advancement in between; it must feature a friend, a lover, a guide, and a villain to propel them all into conflict; and it must restore our faith that when all has sunned and set, we are all, in fact, the same. Different by our walks of life, but mirrored kindly by how we slept at night. And by the blood that flows on through all of us, which was royally blue on the inside, but red on the outside; no matter where we came from. He called it The Rule of Gold, and told me it was written by a bright young upstart called The Freeman, who lived a few towns over. A moorish teen who'd been born a slave, but challenged his slaver to a deathmatch... and won. A warrior, and a poet. He was, apparently, not much older than I was, and seemed to have been blessed with heavenly vision; whatever strung gold was his business to know, yet he was proud to share that weave with any who would listen. It seemed, actually, that it was the weave as well as the string that made it worth something. Another piece The Potionist had shown me was written by someone called The Chancellor, about a boy who searches for riches in the desert, and then finds it back home. It was... a bit self-fulfilling and navel-gazing for my taste, and perhaps even dangerously naïve. But what did I know? I'd never been to the desert, anyway. The Potionist had stories of his own in the works, but that was not his job at the castle, and I'm afraid each chapter only has so much room to speak – I'll have to tell about it another time. He'd also grown beans called 'soy' in his backyard, and used them to somehow make milk – which he told me was healthier than that of a cow, and produced far less stomach irritation. At first I didn't know the difference, but over time, I did notice a bit of a change, though not quite as much as he'd touted. Still, it was exactly what I needed to pad out my diet and not feel starving, and it somehow kept a calm over me. Those were, before I knew they were gone, the good old days.