Tawny days hanging from the sweet autumn breeze are sheltered in corners of my mind I just can’t dare to go to. I hide from them, never closing my eyes—never looking inward. I open them into another haze, though. The dimmest streetlight in the most darksome alley. But between blinks, my eyes burn in golden, and images of remote places flicker in.

Patches of brown leaves on the ground, fragments of Shakespearean poetry carved on trees, a lonely grove between mountains, and a magic lake by my hiding place…

“You would never understand,” I had said to him after weeks of sleeping under willows and sneaking in the cottage through the window. “You don’t know what’s it like to be chased for crimes you didn’t do!” The soldiers had been drawing nearer to the towns about, and I had been left with no choice but to flee from the fate that being an outsider threw at me. “Don’t go,” he had said before my fears revived in my head, killing all peace.....