The first memories I held dated back to when I was eight years old. It was a bleak midautumn's day. The damp air refurbished the color of the sky into a brownish color. Condensed droplets tuned a lullaby in the air, and formed small puddles in the streets where horse drawn cartridges would sometimes pass and cause a splash. The streets would be otherwise quiet, and only a few pedestrians walked on along the shallow pavements. The weather has always been like this in the Celpeian Empire. As a girl who originated from the north, this stuffy air can be quite choking. This land, foreign to my origins, where I couldn't understand the greetings of passerby's as they hailed each us, is where I grew up.

I remember I was sitting alone in the rain, at the bottom of the broad and long stone stairs before the St.Harrow's Cathedral. My parents, they told me to wait there. I vaguely remember their countenance as they spoke to me - full of grieve and regrets, not the face a parent appearing before their children.

They told me to not leave until someone comes to pick me up, not by them, but by a friend of theirs. They stuck a scruffy note in my hand written in a language I can only assume to be Celpeian. They left me a trace of memory of their backs as they faded away.

I cannot recall precisely how long I had waited for, but I knew that dusk approached when the sky had turned from a lighter shade of azure to an inkier shade of blue. Many people went past me into the cathedral: pastors, vicars, chaplains, clerics. I heard guidances of the priests, prayers of faithful mens, chants of devotion, pleads of sinners, acoustics of requiems, they accompanied me momentarily as I waited, and they all left me waiting after they were gone.

My parents and whomever is the friend they spoke about still showed no signs of appearing in. The sermon services the church offered ended long ago. Only a few of the truly faithful ones still stayed. Eventually, the sky became suffiently dark that everything around me had a shade of blue, and I could see no one else in the vicinity. Even so, my eyesight still allowed me to see quite clearly a haggard porter came by, who locked church doors and the gates to the cemetery. He eventually left aswell, and I became the only person still sitting on the stairs in the rain.

Then came a middle aged man, face covered in wrinkles that witnessed his vissicitudes. He had a red rose in his hand, half withered and strown by the rain, and half unbloomed to begin with. He knelt before one of the tombstones which had the name "Elena Davies" engraved upon it's wordy face, and planted the unbloomed flower upon a small pile of dirt he built next to the headstone. As unmoving as everything around him he stood there, staring emptily at the flower before him for no less than thirty minutes before he finally averted his eyes. When he did, he noticed me, the only other person who was still here. He walked over to me, and lowered his upper torso as in a bow to speak to me.

"You have been sitting here for a while. Where have your parents gone?"

I looked into his eyes for a while, and then shook my head awkwardly, accompanied by shivers of coldness or nervousness. I couldn't understand what he said.

He saw that I didn't respond with words. "What's that note you have? Can I see it?"

He was observant and attentive to ask about the note. If he hadn't, I don't know what would have happened to me on that day, perhaps taken hostage by stray dogs, dismembering me overnight. I was lucky to have seen that he asked to see my note in that way, or for me to have considered it to be a gesture to ask me for the note.

I read his expressions became unclear as he read the note. I couldn't tell what he was thinking as he saw the note. He then spoke, in a very slow, and grammatically dismal way in my own language, telling me to go with him. He gestured me to follow him. Perhaps because I was so happy that my parents' friend had finally came to pick me up, or perhaps because I finally heard someone speaking my tougue, I instantly trusted him, and I got up in my numbed legs.

He knew my name, and he told me his. He said he is Linden Leonox, but he didn't elaborate further to introduce himself. After that sentence, He didn't ask me any questions, and he didn't speak to me as we walked. I didn't think it was very courteous, but then again, I wouldn't understand him anyways. I had thought we walked miles from all the twists and bends he led me turning, and all the narrow alleyways that we had to walk through, but it was not a great deal of time before we reached a terribly conditioned dwelling. It's size is not awful, but it's doors had been rusted. It didn't seem like a place habited by human beings, yet that was the home of this friend of my parents'

The immediate moment we walked through those doors, a gush of decaying wind swept past me. The room was dark without a single window until the middle aged man decided to light a candle up. Only then I noticed the size of the interiors of this seemingly insignificant slum house. It was a massive den of deprivation, filled with triple bunk beds and people who had purple black faces, not the healthy type. I saw three slight underweight men in the corner doing nothing, just sitting. Each one of them had eye bags and yellow red veins like the crawling roots of a radish popping out from their eyes. They all looked desperate, like murderous criminals before their final blow before imprisonment, deathly and unafraid of death, but they lacked a target and an intent. They are lost without purpose. They all breathed as troubled death waiters in their agonal stage, gasping before respiration is cut off, but without the struggle to survive. They don't look like they feared their health and condition might get worse as it obviously seemed, but rather, it looked like they couldn't care. They don't mind losing their lives, not out of audacity, but out of greif, having nothing to love in this world. The one who brought be in here contrasts the rest by miles. He even spoke to them in an authoritative manner.

"Where's the big boss?"

There was no reply, so Linden raised his voice slightly, and repeated.

"Where is the big boss?" He added a pause inbetween every word.

All three men. Suddenly looked up in a very shocked manner, in a way that looked like someone pronounced their deaths.  Their faces became clouded with fear and a mixture of some other feelings.

"The Big Boss..." One of them started considering the words deeply, and mumbled them out.

"Yes. Where is he?" Linden becomes slightly impatient in his reply.

"He's just gone out, but he will be back soon." The other one replied, slowly and with a slightly cracking voice.

"I'm just going to wait here then. You two really needs to stop with this unhealthy habit.