Thus I slowly learned the most essential lesson of all. Everything Changes. I hate change. I've always hated change. I have spent good chunks of my life trying to find a safe patch of land to call my own and defend it to the death. The last thing I wanted to do was have to search for another when this one had taken so long to secure. If it had taken so much effort to capture this fort then losing it must surely be a sign that my attempt at life had been roundly defeated. If it was over then, shouldn't I now die? Why wasn't I dead? Was there something else I was missing?So far as I had known to this point, life was about obtaining a specific goal and keeping it. If that goal no longer existed, was it possible to...change the goal? In fact, could I change the path completely? Did I have to follow the original path at all? Once I woke up from my injuries and found that I wasn't dead I began to realize that I could go back to the center and set a new route. All I had to do was continue to remain alive and Time would eventually take me somewhere. In fact, I could go where I thought I could never return. I could return to Eccentricity.I should never have left, by god! I had begun to believe that my other half could not support me, but what if it could? I had been fired because I was different. My most valiant effort to hide and control it had been in vain, for the Mayers, after pretending for so long that they had excepted my handicaps had actually never done so at all. It was time to face a Fact; I was Different and so my life would have to be Different. Instead of hiding and taming the wildness I would now harness it. How could I have been so blind as to believe that because fire can destroy things that that was the only thing it was capable of doing? Fire was powerful. Fire was energy. Fire could be used to fuel civilizations that could not exist without it. I would harness the Void, and this time I will make it set me free.