The mountain we found ourselves in was an abandoned quarry from decades in the past. I remember exploring near here with several of my friends from the military academy, but after several children died here at the hand of the steelfs, the city council placed the area as off limits.

After we met up with Gorge at the Bigel River outside of town, I suggested the setup spot since the quarry positions us near the town without forcing Gorge to produce an enormous amount of noise excavating the area. In short, the area presented the perfect place for enacting our plans.

Gorge had a reservoirr of water built into the base with several branches throughout the expanse. This gave Allure a mobility she's never known, and she bites into the experience with the tenacity of a starved child tearing into peppered meat.

I try mitigating my mutations to an extent, but I find that each time I try, the tails on my back screech and whine with the intensity of babies crying. I also neglect any results from the effort as well. Approaching my family with all these mutations will prove difficult, but I will try to handle the issue the best I can.

That is where I find myself now. I wear a loose robe mimicking the outfit of monks on pilgrimage. In the Magna Alma, the arbiter spoke of finding oneself in the loneliness of abandoning one home to find another. I utilize this factor for my advantage since no one will question a roaming priest of his motives out of respect for his journey.

Using a religious principle for sneaking around eats at my conscious, but the action is necessary. I hope I will only imagine the whiplash I'd experience if I didn't hide myself from the public.

This never dampens my mood however. The cobble stone walkways tap against my feet while nightingales and mocking birds sing their sharp notes. The edges of balconies harbor tiny gardens with vines crawling across the ancient stone that comprises the buildings.

The general populace changed little since my last time being here. Children still climb the vines on the wall with mothers chastising them with an assortment of different weaponry from wooden spoons to true swords. Pockets of soldiers march down the centers of the streets as the town borders the edges of The Fog's advance.

I should have noticed the lack of continuous advance a long time ago, but until I became a military man, I thought of The Fog as a old wives tale for scaring children. How wrong I was then and after meeting the foe.

The scent of vine flowers reminds me of my mother's cooking and the burning of wood for our camping trips in the nearby plains beside the town. Even the extensive canals offer their own ring and hum to the tune of the town. I'm home once more.

After observing the town for a few moments, I find myself walking familiar walkways towards my home without thinking. Old patterns just fall into place without my thinking before I stop a block from the house I grew up in as a child.

The chimney blows smoke from my mother's bakery as smells of bread and cinnamon sift downwind into my welcome lungs as I breath nostalgia. The elegant garden never changed from its series of daffodils and lilacs creating a series of yellow and blue that melds with the scent of bread baking.

My mother proved herself a shrewd business women before she opened up this shop so many years ago. Even without a penny to her and my father's name, they created a thriving business in the era of mass produced food. The garden pleases the eyes and nose while she bought an empty lot that stood between a cluster of buildings.

Wind constantly blows down this alleyway due to that specific cluster, and this saturates several blocks with the constant scent spreading a hunger for her produce that even the fullest man couldn't deny.

She owes much of her success to my father as well however. His ability to balance the numbers and accounting side of the business made him invaluable, and even though he never assisted with the actual cooking of the products, his ability to speak to customers always surprised me.

He dashed on his feet in a pair of old, worn down roller skates as he delivered goods to nearby houses or whenever he skated across the hickory planks lining the bottom of our store.

Ten years have passed since I saw them at my graduation ceremony before I was shuttled to the front lines. Ten years I fought against a foe without reason as I wasted the best years of my life, yet now I don't even know if I will even be able to face my family any longer.

This is perfect. This is the precise place I wished to return to for so many years, yet I never wanted to return like this. If the police figure out my family harbors a fugitive, then every piece of this place will be decimated. Everything they've worked so hard for, for so many years will crumble to ash in a single instance.

There must be another way. I will find one. I turn away as I take a step away from the bakery before I run into a young boy of around eleven years old. He stares up at me wearing the same roller skates of my father before he says,

"Hello there mister. Want some bread?"

An older lady in her later forties comes running out of an alleyway. Her red hair reflects the sun's rays with the same familiar radiance, though a few gray hairs giver her a mature look that she carries with headstrong grace. She reaches behind the child before she pops his backside with a sharp slap as she says with the mixture of concern and fury unique to mothers,

"Stop offering our food for free Micheal."

She looks up at me as she says trying to ease any fires of anger she started, "Not to say I wouldn't want you eating our food though, we just can't afford to give it away for free."

A grin grows on my face before whispers in disbelief, "...Pyrex...Is that you?"

I open my arms as I say with a warm and crooked grin, "I'm home."