– Earthskin –
I have beautiful memories of a world far away. A tropical paradise, bathed in blue and green and golden light. Walking the Earthskin, I spent my youth in years so full of life. Jungles of tall trees, wild valleys filled with ferns and vast fields of crops in cultivation. In places deep and luscious, warm and dark, I wandered where the paved roads of the human world faded away, cracked into the mountainside and became dirt, became a narrow foot trail, and then became nothing; all traces of civilization disappearing into the undergrowth before me.
I was never sheltered, though I was still a child among predators; Strangers and monsters who would consume the younger flesh of me, had they wished to act. Along the beaches, I picked my steps carefully through copses of mangrove, their sharp shoots protecting me from the harm done by those that would not walk so softly through them. Under the protection of my guardians, there was safety in the open air, an innocence of naked skin across the blue ocean waters, palest white against the warm golden sands.
Now I am grown, a predator in kind of the fruits my rare earth bears. I have become too accustomed to the safety of walls, too familiar with the comfort of my bed. I have missed the view of the uncluttered sky. I am hungry like an animal hibernating in the depths of winter, waking to eat, yet still half asleep and stumbling in the snow. The night is longer here, and the sun not so bright in summer; I have forgotten the fullness of its warmth, and fear that it would burn me now if I should choose to lay beneath it.