And so the years went.

I kept on performing Baptisms as I patiently waited to find the right one.

I kept on tending to the farm as I enjoyed the country air, the peacefulness of my days, and the fruit of my own labours.

I kept on working on my bow craftsmanship while at the same time improving my own archery and hunting skills, honing my own deadliness in a very deadly world.

I kept on practising my music, building my skill and a repertoire for when I leave the farm and become the travelling minstrel I have worked towards, my songs paying my way forward through the years as I wander about as a nomad, exploring this world I have spent well over a century in but have yet seen so little of.

And so the years went.

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26 years.

In total I have spent 26 years on the farm. 26 years of isolation, dedication, disappointment and reward as I have worked hard to accomplish my goals.

First things first, the farm.

The farm has remained mostly the same. Every year I have tilled the earth and sown seeds across my fields during the Spring, tended to them and watched them grow during the Summer, harvested them as Autumn came around and then bunkered down in the Winter. Living off my bounty as I waited for the warm months to come around once more so I could do it all again.

Everything mostly looks the same too. I have done a round of painting once, made some repairs to the surrounding fencing, and also fixed some of the damage the barn and house took from a bit of weathering and some harsh weather over the years.

I have also extended my workshop to allow more room for my bow and arrow crafting. Something which I can say I have had great success with.

When I first started off with my amateur ambition of becoming a bowyer with the plan being to use my new craft as a platform to launch myself into becoming an expert marksman, I had a lot to work through.

I had only seen the shapes of bow and arrows on screens, and only held a genuine one once one time at a holiday park as a kid. So I clearly had absolutely no idea about the measurement ratios or all the technicalities that went into building a good and powerful bow.

Luckily for me, I had already seen what the end goal I was trying to achieve looked like, and so with strong drive, the right materials and plenty of time on my hands all working together to get there, I think I have achieved, at least the first part, of what I had set out to do.

The Longbow was the easy one to make, that’s for sure. All I needed were thick enough branches to strip, carve back, and sand down into the appropriate shape before adding notches at both ends. Finishing it off when I slipped a bowstring over each of the ends to complete the self made weapon.

From that point on I only had to figure out the right kind of dimensions that suited my body’s form best. Once I had done that, I built as many various longbows as I could from as many different wood’s as I could find that would work to hone my craft. Then, I set myself a challenge.

I started altering the dimensions of my bows and arrows and materials I used to increase the strain required to pull them. My ambition, which succeeded by the way, was to increase the difficulty of wielding my bows as a means of building up my own strength. Extending my firing range and adding greater force to my shots with the more powerful bows in the process.

Then there were the Recurve bows.

Initially, they presented quite the unsolvable conundrum to me. This being that I didn’t have any idea about how to add in the curves on both ends.

I first tried finding bits of wood with the curve already in them and sticking them together with glue, but that obviously didn’t work.

Then I tried cutting out a piece of wood in the shape of a recurve bow from a large section of a tree trunk. It did end up becoming a recurve bow in the end, but I found the whole process too long and impractical. An impediment for when I might need to build a bow on the fly without a proper workshop in the future.

It was only finally when I was making soup for dinner one night, as I was looking down at the steaming broth wafting vapours right up in front of me, that I got the idea that solved my problem.

I had to steam the wood to soften it up, and then bend it into shape.

This I quickly discovered worked like a charm. And soon in no time at all I was churning out recurve bows at the same rate as my longbows.

You might ask why I bothered building recurve bows when I already had longbows at the ready anyway. The reason is because I knew from my life before that there were advantages and disadvantages to each version of the weapon.

Longbows you’ll find are easier to make and quicker to draw, but are long and so can be unwieldy to carry around and transport. Recurve bows are otherwise smaller and more difficult to make, but their shape makes them the overall more powerful weapon that delivers arrows with greater force behind them when released. So rather than pick one and lose out on the advantages of the other, I picked both.

Now having properly armed myself from that point onwards, I spent my time with my bows less inside the workshop and more outside of it, increasing my accuracy when using them as I began using my time to now go out into the surrounding wilderness and test my skills. Determined to use them to turn myself into a hunter and thereby become capable of defending myself.

Next to hunting I practised my music everyday also, and have managed to make a first draft of my lute or guitar (depends how you look at it). I can even play a few tunes on it too, but I know it's not ready yet and still open to much improvement. When it makes its debut on the world stage I have to make sure that it’s perfect.

And of course concerning my Baptisms, I am up to number 1290… with no success yet.

But I haven’t given up. I’m not even halfway there yet. Still plenty of techniques to work through. I just have to be patient.

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42 years.

In total I have spent 42 years on the farm. 42 years of isolation, dedication, disappointment and reward as I have worked hard to accomplish my goals.

First things first, the farm.

The farm is still the same, and I have kept all the maintenance up to date and in good order. The only difference to be seen is a couple of new crops grown from a few new types of seeds I found at the markets in Mellawin. From when I visited some years earlier to gather supplies and pay my taxes.

My bow making has reached a bottleneck in that there’s nothing left to improve upon. In lieu of this I’ve started expanding my skills and am now trying to make crossbows, and have actually made some prototypes that look promising. But difficulties with the string and the requirements I feel that can only be met with some metal components has made progress slow. Not that it really bothers me though as I knew I could only really take my bowyer profession so far anyway. What matters is what I am using all my pieces of work for.

Regularly, usually once a month, I have been going out on hunting trips into the woods to try out and test my hunting skills. I have become able to shoot down birds in mid flight, skewer fish in fast moving waters, and hunt down small game that I either take down from a distance or chase through the woods on foot until I ensure that I’ve put an arrow through them.

Whatever I encounter, I make sure that I can hunt it.

The farm was my home, but after decades of the peacefulness of it all I was having to admit to myself that it was starting to wear down on me somewhat. These expeditions of mine to go out and hunt were actually really escapes from my humdrum life, welcoming how at the same time they were helping to make me stronger as I prepared myself for the big bad world. I was starting to get anxious for them more and more as the years went by, the hunts growing longer and longer as I ventured deeper and deeper into the vast forests situated all around me.

My music though, I have to say… is brilliant. I might of course be overvaluating myself, and the years alone without critics may have led to some incorrect assumptions about the quality of the songs and melodies I can play, but even with that self acknowledgment… I can safely say that I have become a masterful musician.

About 9 years ago I had finally reached perfection and with all the different woods, strings and other small things in between until finally, I managed to make a working guitar. Good enough I’m certain to fit into any other music store on Earth.

The body is big and hollow enough to propel sound forward, the frets are all in the right spots to make the right notes when I place my fingers on them, the strings are good enough to sound a clear pitch and the string posts are able to adjust the tune of the strings smoothly and accordingly.

When the guitar was finally done I was immensely ecstatic, immediately making myself familiar with it that very same day. I started my practice first off by figuring out the individual notes, then some chords that I could strum, and then dancing my fingers over the scales and arpeggios hidden all the way up and down the neck of the instrument.

Only then, did the magic start being made.

Obviously not literal magic. but musical magic, the magic of home. I had lost many songs and their corresponding melodies to the back of my mind through the decades but I still had a good amount of hits I remember well enough to sing along to even now, and so that was where I started from.

Quite soon I began playing out the notes and developing song structures as I grew my skill with my new guitar. Daily practice and exploration of the musical soundscape eventually led to the creation of a repertoire now consisting of over 200 songs including love songs, ballads, lyrical tales, country, blues, rock, folk and roots. All with a personal twist coming from both me and the songs that I’ve heard played before in bars and taverns that held the music of Calzyn

The hardest part of it all was actually converting the songs sung in my native tongue into the Cali spoken here. Words had to be replaced or rearranged, and sometimes the song's topic and what it was trying to say was lost altogether to my dismay but eventually, I translated the music of Earth into a new sensation that I’m sure will rock the music of Calzyn.

They won’t know what hit them.

And of course concerning my Baptisms, I am up to number 2103… with still no success yet.

But I haven’t given up yet. I still have hundreds still to get through, no real reason to be worried. I’ll get to it soon, I know it.

I’ll still find it.

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68 years.

68 years I have spent in total on the farm. 68 years of isolation, dedication, disappointment and reward as I have worked hard to accomplish my goals.

First things first, the farm.

The farm’s fine. It’s been fine for decades now and I’ve worked on it constantly so nothing has changed and it’s stayed fine.

I’m completely certain I have perfected my bow and arrow making skills. Unless I come across some mana rich wood or string to upgrade the materials that I am using then the bows I make are the best that I ever can. I even managed to develop a few workable crossbows however they’re very heavy and not at all convenient to carry around or even use. But I know how to make one now so I can make one again if I have to, that’s all that matters.

My music is great too. My technique has been refined fantastically and my repertoire has only grown, even containing a few of my own compositions. Not that I know if they're any good as no one else but me has ever heard them.

And of course concerning my Baptism, I am up to number 2809… with still no success.

No success.

Not a single fucking one of them worked out.

For 68 years I have practised and worked and struggled and hoped and prayed and given up and tried again and done it all over and over again, going through the same motions repeatedly and systematically, clinging to all of my hopes and dreams that I haven't betted on my stupid theories and misinformed guesses, and…

It hasn’t worked out.

68 years spent on a baseless hope. All of it, for nothing.

“...God FUCKING DAMN IT!!!”