@OracleSage Thank you for sharing your story. This has a very deep value for many and a beautiful heart.
@Ginger your story moved me to tears. I worked with at risk kids for a long time and fought for children whose stories remind me of yours. I am humbled by your heart and honesty. Your compassion makes you a powerful light and leader.
@Nomad the greatest champions and protectors are those that walk beside the weak or wounded and offer understanding and kindness. I am grateful for your words 
lets see⌠When i joined the mountaineers, I had been in the middle of a crisis of faith, of sorts, in my own abilities. I had been a game developer since early middle school, but recently my life had thrown a sudden and unexpected twist into the mix. I ended up having to deal with a suden onset of extremely rapid-acting depression and burnout, which hit me like a freight train. See, id always wanted to start a company, and i even went as far as opening a website and hiring crew onboard, but I had run into issue after issue, and I had just had one of my projects get totally stolen from under my feet, reworked completely and then abandoned, with the crew disappearing on me and leaving me alone. I was crushed, and in fact ive never touched game development again.
When I found the monarch papers, I had found myself at a crossroads. Game development had become something I hated and dreaded, and I couldnât exactly do anything else with my life, due to my lack of work experience, so what was i to do?
Well, that came in the form of music. I had learned to play guitar around the same time as all this was happening, and I began busking, playing on the streets, screaming my anger and hate and pain at the heavens. To my surprise, people began to PAY for my music. I was amazed. In all my time making games, id never been PAID to make my projects. This was something that I respected and loved, adored even, and here I was, using it to pay for and support my family. My faith was being shaken, my very idea of who and what i wanted to be was being overwritten.
This was when i found it. A book, but not, about people id never heard of, much less seen before, but that called to me all the same. I was entranced, and within a week id joined up.
So I got kind ofâŚuhâŚwriter brain with this butâŚyeah.
When I was a little girl, I knew my father was a wizard.
He wasnât a wizard like Merlin from the movie. I never saw Dad wearing a pointy hat or billowy robes, never saw him wave a wand or turn into a squirrel. But he was magic all the same, and it was as obvious to me as the sky.
The green world outside the walls of our house teemed with a tangle of life under his hands. The neighbors would stand staring at the waving wildflowers and garden boxes overflowing with tomatoes and peppers, carrots and lettuces, tall stalks of dill swaying between them all. The dill was allowed to grow where it wanted. So was the sorrel.
Have you tasted wild sorrel? Itâs unlike anything else. The flavor runs sharp between sour and salt, and so vibrantly green. I foraged it through the heavy midwestern summers from under the shadows of roses and marigolds, lilac bushes and black-eyed susans. I swirled it in bowls of garden hose water and grazed while I watched the mantis pods, waiting for my friends to hatch.
My father showed me things like that, things about the hidden world of black soil and roots, mosses and fern fronds. He told me old stories of ancient seas and great beasts, of fish spawning and tadpoles growing legs. âLife eats life,â he told me as I cupped earthworms in my tiny hands and laid them lovingly in the dark earth of his compost bins. That was the lesson. I watched my goldfish become roses after I wrapped them in little shrouds and gave them to the garden. I knew what he meant. The Wheel. The Web. The Chaos of Change.
And then something shifted. The garden flourished as always, trees still swayed and cicadas buzzed but the world went quiet in a way I didnât notice while it happened. Life continued its spin like my bike with its broken gear shiftâpedaling along somewhere between one and another; functional, but grating on itself, unsure. The wild world Dad had shown me was there still. I could see it, but I couldnât see it. My eyes were blinkered, my ears muffled and I was none the wiser to it. I left the flat ancient seabed lands for the cedar forested foothills that had pulled at me all my life, though when asked why Iâd come I never said as much. âI like the scenery,â I would tell people and pretend that my chest didnât ache with some force I couldnât name when I saw the mountain waiting and watching against the morning haze as I inched my way in traffic to work each day.
So the days and years went, with this blank spot flitting the edges of my thoughts, prodding for my attention on the verge of sleep and drawn up by the hiss of wind through leaves. I tried to fill the blank spot, tried to schedule and plan and highlight it out. It worked well enough to live with. But change comes whether weâre ready or want it.
On a spring afternoon as I scrolled through my phone to fill the void between tasks my screen paused itself-like it does these days-on a curious image of a book. Something below the blank spot nudged my thumb to tap the screen.
I began the Assessment with the bland, tired face of the hardened service worker between customers. By the end I was smiling, curled over my desk in anticipation, waiting and watching for something I knew and didnât all at once. The Guide decided.
Balimora.
The word struck me like a bell and the blank spot bloomed. The taste of wild sorrel sprang to my tongue and I remembered my father kneeling at the edge of his garden, a tomato plant wriggling free of the earth to slither gently on pale roots into his waiting hands.
My father was a wizard. I had forgotten, and-somehow-so had he.
We donât realise how many chances we get until we desperately want a âdo overâ. We always seek a bit of extra slack or wiggle room so that the risks we take arenât permanent, so that we can go back if we donât like the outcome. How much must we fear failing if we are afraid to commit ourselves?
You do not need to know all my stories or even all of the story that I am living now. You do not need to know the story I lived before. I remember it in half forgotten dreams and thoughts or are they nightmares? Things dark and hateful, images cruel and uncaring. A name I no longer wish to remember or hear. A road I do not wish to walk.
I was a solitary child. A lonely child. I saw coldness and cruelty and I saw love of a kind. A forgotten bastard and a cherished potential. I lived with my face in books dreaming of forgotten places and magics old. I always wanted to see and read forgotten languages and to write them in my skin. I would scratch symbols and images from dreams in ash into my being. Nature itself would speak to me of memories and tongues once heard by the trees and stones. I have always lived in a half dream never knowing what was real. I have often felt I was the butterfly of Zhuang Zhou.
Then when I was 11 a father I barely knew died and with him a mantle I did not wish to bare became mine. The child without right must bare the responsibility for the breaking or making of his brother. I became watchful and cautious. I mustered strength and I struggled. I committed to a life sacrificing in ways I hoped would be forgiven for what I hoped would be a better world. I walked a dark road and I sought comfort in dreams and the voices of things around me, the hidden languages of things still speaking to me when I sought to calm my mind. At last at the end of all things I shared my sorrows with my brother and sought to break myself. There must be balance in all things. If I must walk yang then to I must see yin.
In a new harmony I found a new way; a second chance. From a cold and dark exile I was called back into being. Along my road someone had seen my deeds but also the nature of my heart. Had seen the work of my hands and the crafting and fixing of things deemed broken. The desire to mend while I myself broke, to trade my wholeness for the repair of others. This mentor guided me to continue to craft and shape myself and my world to listen to what spoke to me and to train my heart and hands to the alchemy and artifice of service. I find strength in harmony. I train the mind and the body to withstand the struggles of being and to hold the flame to bring to others. I became an artificer of thought and learning; a teacher and guide. I learnt the transformation of learning and listening.
I found magiq in sharing the struggle and to offer warmth when others felt defeat. In listening to the world many truths unfold before us and learning to bare witness can have more power then action. I have found my magiq in dreams and in mending, in service and in struggle. I still mark my craft in blood and the ink I write my Runes into my skin but now I carry the Forges flames in my heart and hands so that those that struggle may find their way. I was once something else and now I am something different. I am Calm and I will keep company with you and mend what you ask.
So I found the Guide in what I figure is a most mundane way, through a Facebook ad. I donât recall any connection to anything before it, but there was always some search for more. Since finding the Guide, I needed to know more, I needed to feel the world, see how it was rediscovered.
But the veil continues to work to keep us in the dark. It was only after I took note of how events play out around magiq that a pattern appeared. Without the focus to continue, I would have been drawn away by any of a large variety of items that came up over the last day at work. But the itch for more was in the back of my head. The need to connect to gestures to all of you this was constantly nudging me to continue. I finished TMP:F&F and began TMP:C&T even with the interruptions brought on by the mundane world.