Breakthroughs are dangerous things. Don't be in such a hurry to change the world. Before you introduce chaos, first understand the chaos that already reigns. Then, you must understand if your chaos will balance or usurp. If it balances, then what remains after?

If it usurps, then what controls?

His words were gentle and calm, but his body was weak and dying.

In my grandfather's eyes I saw everything but understood nothing.

When someone hands you the world, they often forget that a man can only hold so much.

I was an arrogant boy.

Well, young man now.

In my youth I was always at the corner of the room, never in the center but always wanting its light. I saw the boys in the limelight for everything I wasn't. Confident and elegant where I was insecure and clumsy.

I always had an appetite for food but never the self control to understand when enough was enough.

This led to a pudginess that pushed me more into the corner, to hide with shame. Instead of wearing my faults like amor, I let them cut me like thorns.

When these confident boys became young men, they chose the path of squires.

Somehow, so did I.

Always the battle-dummy, the boy left to pick up the practice blades. My growth stunted.

While I became wide and slow.

They became strong and quick.

Years flew like ravens on the wind.

Then, a time of vultures was upon us.

The King needed men for his war against the revolting South.

A shame that all he had were boys playing the part of men.

And so the boys most confident, the ones who flourished, were honored with their gleaming armor and blades which whistled in the wind.

Blades that were only days before made of wood, now cut with a refined steel.

I, being the bottom of the barrel, was left to train the younger boys. The ones who showed more promise than me, the older one left behind.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

And so time passed again as it always does, and will continue for as long as man was there to experience it.

Time and battle would soon reveal that the South was a mistaken War.

Later, years removed, known as the Fool's War.

The king's armies had been slaughtered. What returned were not the confident young men, but a handful of survivors crippled and disfigured.

Their beauty was stolen by scars and burns.

Their ego's crushed by the reality of war.

Their dreams broken like birds too soon to fly.

I grinned at their return.

I reveled in their defeat.

I was a sour boy then. And I am still a bit of that boy, today.

It burns me to know that I will always be a bit of him deep down.

I had begun to grow into my body with the years I was left to train undisturbed.

The young talent I trained quickly became more for my growth than for their own.

Whispers of the bull began to spread.

They keep me hidden. With how the war was turning, they had decided to end their supply of boys to a war that wouldn't be won

Once big and round, now I had begun to shed the pudgy and become firm like the base of a hard oak tree.

The boys once talented, the ones that ridiculed me no longer held a candle to the flame that was being cultivated within my hearts of hearts.

Yet, their eyes did not tell of envy.

They did not compare themselves to me.

Their eyes were broken like their limbs

Like ghosts, the once happy boys roamed the halls of the compound. Choosing to sleep in the watchtower. Where they kept watch over the land. Under stars that once shone as bright as their path, they now confided in the dark which surrounded the dazzling lights.

One whispered to me, when I had been drawn the lot of watch.

When I was young I would stare up at the sky and only see the stars that would guide my path. Thinking that one day I would like a star, never forgotten.

Too bright to fade.

His words were low, as I clutched at my cloak against the cold of the night and the ice of his words.

Now, well now, I notice that for every star there is a void of darkness. That I had a greater chance of becoming void than of becoming a light that shines.

Moving his stare from the cobbled window that held the sky like a canvas does a painting, he set his eyes on mine. A cold blue they once seemed, now a lusterless gray. War strips man of the deep qualities that one can never gain back.

It takes boys everything and leaves them searching with nothing.

If only we had been as lucky as thee.

A boy let to grow into a man.

Now ain't that a beautiful sight.

His words sliced the cold air with a hostility that only a man who's seen war could harness.

To find oneself out in the battlefield is near impossible.

To survive, to return intact, is near impossible as well.

As he said these words he turned his sight to the stump that used to be a hand that held a blade with the hope of a young squire wishing to become a knight, brilliant and strong.

I want to leave you with something, his voice held time in his phantom hand like a being beyond our physical land.

What is that, I managed to whisper into the rough air.

My dreams and my being...

He said as he leaned then fell out the window and off the watchtower and into the dark of the night.

His body shattered as it reached the ground.

But his soul was already broken.