Time, youth and beauty can never be recaptured; certain paths to opportunity may be closed and never embarked upon again.  Still, what has been been lost may be regained in different forms.  Disrupted and driven to the edge, buried alive in a cellar for years only to rise from my sanctuary and nameless grave has strengthened me so I can no longer feel the pain and can withstand almost every storm.  Having risen from dust and mold from my tomb, with a promise from God's lips to return what had been taken, and to wash clean all the transgressions and curses placed on my head.  

  In frustration at the fact no amount of demon-conjuring or death invocations have affected me, physical actions were contemplated but these too, have failed, and the eyes are upon them who think they are hidden.  Darkness and obscurity can only reign so long before the light shines on them and they run like insects out from under the rotting wood in which they hide.  Each spirit of the dead set against me I have taken under my skirts to shelter; each demon sent forth I have lulled to a deep slumber.  While sleeping under the ground I had made friends with the roots of trees, the gnomes and the creatures residing in these places, and met many a soul that had passed on.  

  My return is as silent as a frozen wintry landscape, as loud and commanding as the impending storm, as common as the gentle breeze which causes the tussles of ripe corn plants to bow again and again, and as extraordinary as the flow of lava burning everything in it's path.  Invisible to all who see me as I am unexpected, and in my silence I remain unannounced until I command the attention.  

  Forces of nature have been tampered with by many; the forces of life and death disrupted.  We rise, walk and seek the blood of those who sought to destroy us or to mold us into a wax image and poppet to do their bidding.  We have returned in a form unfamiliar and unmistakably alive to touch that which was ours, to weep for that which has become so dreadfully and devastatingly lost while we were asleep in our earthy confines.  Wedded by the very people who brought us together for harm's sake, we our intertwined and bound together in eternal love; we will take back that which we have sorely lost, or perish trying.  To perish will only send us deep into the world of spirits and we wait at the dock for new incarnations as we have done so many times before.  

  Return us to our home, we pray, where we touch everything we worked so hard for, everything we fought to keep so that we may restore it to all of its grandeur and stature, no matter how meager and poor the others may view it to be.  Ashamed of it all, they speak of it as an inconvenience and never acknowledge they were part of such a place.  It was home, and it still is.  Time will not erase what has been, and it is a deep mark on our hearts we bear always.  Embittered by it all, yet we understand the need to conceal that which we find difficult to acknowledge; as we never admitted the divorce between the mother and father, and announced publicly it was still a marriage though it was legally and emotionally dead long ago.  Human err is sometimes too hurtful even to admit to ourselves.  

  I stand alone now, and through my insight and the tears which cloud my eyes as I see through the veil which divides the living and the dead, I return to touch that which is beloved and through me the ancestors of that land, day and age, relish the moment.