For several weeks the castle buzzed with activity; everyone from the littlest peasant to the most ego-inflated general was getting ready for the impending war. Everyone was far too busy to stop and play with the Princess. I could have ordered someone to do so, I suppose, but that just seemed unfair to me, so I refrained from doing so.

Preamble

Once upon a white summer, in the kingdom on Arayle , the only daughter of King Reynold and Queen Loryssi was born.

Will I forsake the lonesome path
I've beaten all these many years?
How can I? -- How can I not?
Will I lay eye again on what was dear to me?
recover what along the way was lost?
Dear God...

When this path turns to two
Which will I know to take? How will I know
the one that leads me home?
the one that leads me back to you?

Where do you turn?
Whose arms do you run to?
Whom do you trust?
Whom do you call?

Fights all the time.
Name calling, yelling.
Where do you run?
How do you live?

Whom do you trust?
She says this.
He says that.
How can I love?

All the abuse,
Drinking and actions.
It feels sick,
And no one is really there.

I can’t go on.
Life is too hard.
There must be something better.

On my bookshelf, right in front of me as I type, there is my treasured bible from my childhood, worn, bookmarked and doggy-eared, but getting dusty. Next to it is an English interpretation of the Koran (the Koran can’t actually be translated, so instead I have: The Meaning of the Glorious Koran). This is not a very worn text – I’ve opened it a few times but I have never digested it.

From the Shire
Three is company
Then short cut to mushrooms
Dinner at farmer Maggot’s
Song at the Barrow Downs
To the inn at Bree
Eaten at Midge Water Marshes
Then on to Weathertop
Knife in the dark
Stop at Trollshawe
Flight to the Ford
Healed at Rivendell
Council of Elrond
Then to the passage south
Over Caradhas
Down Caradhas
Through the Mines of Moria