With your wisdom borne of ten centuries of patient waiting, hoping, did you know that a sudden blinding, thunder bolt of revelation might destroy me? Was it then that you decided to wait? When you have waited a long, dark, millennium what is a mere quarter century?! Did you decide to whisper in my ear by day, and guide me through the land of dreams as I slept? Were you there when I made those first tentative steps, helping, encouraging? Did you guide my steps on that fateful night, when my life changed forever?

Were you beside me, there on the deck of the ship that retraced the path my ancestors took so long ago, when I returned to our Northern home? Did your old heart soar when the first of my line to speak a Nordic tongue in a thousand years was born? She will not be the last, old man, on this I swear. So, did it happen then? Was it then you lit the fire? Like all fires, it began with a single, glowing ember, and like all fires there was that endless moment of uncertainty, when the fire dances between life and death. This fire is alive, old man, alive and burning brightly. In the years to come it will grow so tall and burn so fiercely that it's purifying flames will sweep across that land, a brilliant sheet, cleansing it, visible even in the land of our fore-fathers, across the great sea.