♫Pink Floyd - When The Tigers Broke Free♫

June 25th, 1778

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Today is a day of farewells and departures.

It's a dirty day for those who live in Burmecia, Land of Eternal Rain.

A day to say goodbye without sheding tears from distance. A day where even the most miserable of the men will soon be buried in flakes of gold. A scoundrel day, for those afraid to leave their families at their own; A proud day, for those willing to die for their families. It's a day to wave goodbye for those we must protect. A day to wear our uniforms and march to an outlying path – a devious one – towards future.

This pale atmosphere, this fear we're carrying within us... It's only natural for us, rats. This shivering, suddenly colder feeling, travelling throught my gray skin, like a trunk who has hit by the lightning on a rainy night. This kind of emotion is familiar for me, and for us. I felt the same on the day father left to the fields. — I'll be back – he said. That was a promise kept for me, mother and all my siblings.

But he never came back.

— 'Like autumn leaves beneath the ground' – I still remember those euphemistic words they said when I was a kid, standing at the front door, behind mom's legs. By they, I mean father's best friends – soldiers from the same partition as father –, who, at least, had survived. They both shared arms and legs covered by white bandages. One of them still had a wound open in his left arm, and I saw his bandage leak out a reddish substance. It was truly horrid the way his wound opened before us. Fortunately, he took control of it with a piece of cloth from his pocket. I felt sorry for him, because I noticed that peculiar piece of cloth had the same reddish color before he cleaned his wound. To deal with such unpleasant thing as an open wound like a daily habit for the entire life... This kind of thought sent chills throught my body.

I wanted to get away from there and go play somewhere else outside home, with my siblings or with the friends from the nearest neighboors, but something inside me wanted to know what happened to father. They continued, saying he fought bravely against our fiend – 'Alexandria' – before he 'flew throught the horizon sky'. For a month, I couldn't even look at the empty sky, thinking about my father. I blamed this Alexandria for taking father away from me before he could fullfill his promise of coming back, but I was proud he died for our homeland.

Thus, I realized that promises were such fragile things, like glass. And that we are ephemeral beings, like an animal called Youth, that resides within us. As a locust who rejects his older shell in a process of reaching maturity, I left behind my younger self – his way of living, his perspectives, his flesh – in order to grew up. From a new way of living, adulthood was born; from new perspectives, new beliefs were born; and from a new flesh, Love was born.

We must terminate all alexandrian presence over this region. Even althought Lindblum intervened last time, this must be done. The Regent can't meddle this time, because a civil war can only be resolved by the parts in conflict. In other words, the fate of the people we care about – the same people Father cared about – is hang on by a threat of centuries. It doesn't matter if we are right or if we are wrong. Before the red rain comes, there are dead to respect, and respect to be born.

Now I, Bartholomew, son of Major Brandford, must wave, without sheding a single tear, and say... Goodbye. Farewell to my dear friends, Josef, Paul, Charles, Wendy, Lisa; farewell to my siblings – except my older brother Clyde, who's in my accompany – and farewell to my family – my dear wife, Lenneth, descendant of the Crescent clan and former Dragon Knight, and our only 5 year-old son, Jack.

May our god, Bahamut, bless their souls... before I flew throught the horizon sky.

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