I don't recognise myself anymore, I said, as I lifted the by now familiar and comforting hood from my face, I don't even know why I bother to wear it anymore, simple matter of habit... the fact that when I first came here I'd no wish to be seen or heard of. I don't recognise myself, these black robes, a coil of thin wire tucked away in my cloak, the daggers, the poison, lock-picks... the tools of my trade. I've a small fortune but by now I've so much blood on my hands directly or indirectly even if I wash it all away it will forever be a stain on my memory... I can not get out. Bree, how the cobbled streets of this little town have changed me after all this time... I care not, what is this? guilt, the pangs of a guilty conscience, what it is, I don't know. I try to remember, the faces, the many twisted and contorted faces as they breathed their last, but I do not remember any of them anymore, they all look the same to me, they ain't folk to me, just means to an end... for that is what I am now, an opportunist... e'er since Archet was first razed all that time ago and I bumped into Theroneth, a man I had not seen for near twenty years back when I was a young captain, this has been my life. I was bruised and battered, I didn't know myself, not only scarred by the mark close to my eye the Dunlander had left me but broken in mind and spirit too. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth... those are the words I've always lived by, Grimlang was the first, by some stroke of luck I chanced upon the man close to the marshes and there in my anger I tore the man limb from limb, leaving his bloodied carcass there in the waters. Did I feel any better for it? The answer is, nay... it won't bring me my life back, it won't bring me Aela back, nay in fact, how I sometimes miss the good old days, jus' me 'n old Leofric, us against the world. The copious lot of ale, the women... racing, the thrill of a mass charge. Brawls of a night where I'd prove the odd fools who dared to bet their hard coin against me wrong, those were the days... I've a wife now, and a child, but somewhere along the way I feel as though I've lost a part of myself?
*A splodge of ink is strewn across the first page, and the near enough blank book from which you read smells distinctly of stale ale.*
