This city will always be home,
But I will never return. Its streets, once mine,
Are now graves of memories-
And shadows are no longer welcoming.

I remember the challenge, the rush, the love-
Every step, a dance we thought unending,
Exuberance carved into stone and sky.
But joy is a lie we tell ourselves,
And passion? Just a blaze that's meant to burn out.

Now the streets bend beneath the weight
Of promises unfulfilled and,
The corpses of broken dreams.
Every step I take is haunted by what was,
By the bones of the life we built.

The laughter, the love- it all faded away,
Silent and slow, like a cancer unknown.
I tried to find the cure.
Tried to stoke the embers with once capable hands,
But only ashes remained.

To go back now would be to stand among ruins,
To feel the weight of all that is lost.
The city may still breathe, but I cannot-
Not there, not in the shadow of that silence.

Yet even as I leave, it pulls at me,
A longing I will never shake.
I carry the streets, the memories, the dreams-
Fragments of a place that will always be mine,
But never again will I call it home.

Now I set off, not to mourn,
But to find what remains in the world ahead.
I go to search for my son,
Renew a rivalry with the Uraian-gattar poetaster,
To find what happened to the Princess of the Danai,
And discover where the horizon ends.

Penned by my hand on the 13th of Aeguary, in the year 959 AF.