THE MOONDROP SAGA
Prologue:
Grandpa was dying. It had been a year-long battle with some mystery disease even the doctors in the city deemed incurable, and now, in the winter of my twenty-second year, it seemed the unconquerable illness was about to deal its final blow. Grandpa had long been incapacitated from the fighting; all he had the strength to do now was lie beneath the starched covers of his bed and wait for the life to leave him. The situation wasn't much different for my father and I: for the past several months we'd been making weekend trips to the countryside to tend to Grandpa, like good comrades-in-arms. There wasn't much we could do about the sickness ravaging his body, but we could at least be with him when the time came for the anticipated surrender.
Those were my thoughts as I marched up the winding path that led to Grandpa's farm, Moondrop. It was a bleak morning, four inches of snow on the ground and not one portent of the spring we wished would burst through the iron-grey cloud cover and rejuvenate the land. By "we," I mean my father and I – and I might as well include inhabitants of Flowerbud Village, the outskirts of which the Moondrop Farm was located. It was true that Dad and I, in all our preoccupation with Grandpa, never interacted much with the villagers (who probably cast us off as two of those sort, the snooty city folks who came around every so often to demonstrate just how much better they were to the country bumpkin), but it was difficult to imagine anyone not longing for spring, what with the protracted blizzards and incessant cold that penetrated even the woolliest of sweaters this season. Maybe it's because I've always been a warm-weather guy (winters back home were rarely very harsh); maybe it's because I'd driven up too many times from my grim metropolis only to encounter bleaker visions here – whatever the reason, as I pushed aside the gate to the Moondrop Farm and found myself looking out onto acres of infinite snowfields, I couldn't help but dispatch a little prayer to the Goddess: Please let this end soon. The land needs to thaw.