First Exercise (10 minutes)

My real name is buried deep on a farm filled with brambles with razor-sharp grey thorns. The silt path to the place my name is buried is thin and winds between each towering bramble. One wrong step will bring you to ruin, since beneath the thorn-clouds there are hidden mud traps to catch virgins and the unwary.

My real name is in a strong box, iron-grey, corroded with the earth’s sweat. I put it there in secret, millennia ago. I laugh when I read books in the modern tongue, on that narrow shelf they call fantasy, when they make blithe statements like ‘the wizard has lived for millennia’. Idiots and assholes all, they have no idea what that means. They have no path to understanding the slow trickle of a moment, a year, or a day. I sucked in those moments, like an infant at the breast. Each one has a space in my mind’s eye and I am transported back, all unwillingly, at the trigger of a smell, the downward shift of cloth on long, long legs in a tousled bed, the hot salt musk of blood in the center of my tongue.