You never really realize how much you miss home until you don’t have one anymore. You forget all about the little things, and the creature comforts, the things you take for granted. Things like the smell of freshly baked bread… or a thin sheet stretched over a threadbare mattress. Anything was better than nothing, too bad you don’t realize it until it’s all gone, out of your hands.

	There is a saying, in the place where I’m from ‘guile thalmhainn’. Closest I can translate it to, in laymen’s terms it means ‘blood of the earth’. Pretty fitting if you ask me. After all, aren’t we all born of the earth? Part of her, living with her, within her, beating for her, our blood is earth blood. Our sweat, and tears move mountains if we make them.

	It’s pretty clear after all, our bodies return to the earth. And haven’t you ever seen blood spilled upon it? Well I have, and let me tell you, the soil soaked it up like water. Sinking into the ground, into the earth where it came from, and vanishing as if it never existed. Men, women, children… the earth doesn’t care, and most men don’t either. Spilled blood is a fool who can’t stand against you twice, or so they say.

	Heh, that’s not to say it’s the blood of the earth that is in mortal veins. No, that blood is… it’s something more. Something much more than any man should carry. There are those – few, so very few – that know what I mean. They hate it, they worship it, and they love it. This earth blood that courses through our veins like hot fire. The mortal blood that was stolen from us and the blood the earth gave us in return. Wildness inside that only the hearts of men can tame.

	I often forget how long ago it happened, when you see that scarlet drop sucked away by the hungry world around you. After a while, it loses its mysticism and you turn to other things to keep your interest. Or maybe that’s just growing up, the eyes of a child losing its innocence. Whatever it is, I remember it with every dream, an ever repeating nightmare that I can no longer escape…