Kia's Journal page 1

We set sail on the wettest day I could ever bring to mind. The sky was the same gray as an old nail. It was quiet out. We could tell the town was more then ready to be rid of us. Instead of pouring into the street with joy, the mood was just as morose as the weather.

The North Hare was our ship. She was waiting for us to board, like a mother waiting for her child to come home. She was a small boat. Just as I always do, before we left I tied a dead rabbit from the mast for luck.
I’d been sailing with my daddy all my life. He taught me all I knew about the sea. He told me all of the secrets he knew, which in truth was merely a drop in the vast and endless sea.
He told me what it meant when the sky bled on the horizon. He told me what it meant when the sea takes an odd green instead of a pearly blue. He told me to kill a rabbit before each journey and hang it off the bow to please the gods.
My father was a fisherman. He was a damn good one at that. In addition to catching fish well, he also caught both the admiration and disdain for the little town we came from. He supplied the best fish at the highest quantities and sold it for the lowest prices. Along with his excellent fish my father brought the city endless exasperation from his drunken tirades. He’d been arrested a few times, but that never stopped him.
I can say fairly that there was no in-between with my father. The good times was really good, the bad times was really bad. The only consistency was I never gave up on him and always loved him.
It happened more then once that he gave me a black eye. I don’t want to sound like I held that against him or make anybody think that I had a bad childhood. But I can attest for a few times where I’d wake up in the morning and get ready for school. My father had been up all night drinking and for one reason or another he decided that he didn’t like something I said or did, or sometimes didn’t do.
On one particularly bad occasion I came to school with a pretty bad shiner. The older kids wanted to know how I got it… so I lied and said I been in a fight with some notoriously big kid from another school. They didn’t believe me, so they beat me up real good to show me not to lie.
That incident thought me two things. One, I never lied a day in my life after. Two, I dropped out of school, realizing it weren’t for me. I learned to read, write, and my numbers, and decided that was all I needed.
My father didn’t mind at all. In fact, I think a part of him was relieved. He needed another set of hands, and in the past few years he knew he was slowing down some.
We set out for six months of the year at a time. We typically set sail the last day of summer, and don’t come back till the first day of spring. I remember it well because it was a grim day and the city was ready to toss us out like old garbage. My father was just released from a few days in the city jail for causing a riot.
Was a funny story on how that came about, maybe I’ll tell that story another time. To give you a short upshot of it all, my father was considered a strange man by most people’s accounts. We had lived on the outskirts of Quel’Thalas and rumors had been flying in the major city that other elves were using something called the Well of Eternity to stave off the ongoing feud with the trolls. I didn’t have an opinion on this one way or the other, but my father believed that using any form of arcane magic was bad. He got really drunk and stirred up the town with his ranting and raving. They tossed him in the drunk tank till he both sobered up and simmered down.
So when we set sail, the I could feel a nearly tangible sense of relief from the city. It was going to be a long trip, and one where only I came home.