Cities - where there are boisterous merchants, courageous heroes, regale noble houses, magicians, and even knights. 

And then just outside a particular city built on a seemingly endless grassy plain, just outside its gallant walls, there are little cities - a community of tiny hovels governed by men whose backs are broken down, where suffering is closer than your closest friend, and where a young boy named Alm lives with his father. 

In a small dirt structure with just enough room for a pair to sleep, there was an emaciated, sallow looking child with hair that could vaguely be made out to be blonde from the dirt encrusting it.

A small man with a rigid back and a troubled face walked into the tiny structure and lightly said, "get up." 

He waited a second and then kicked the child in the stomach, hard. 

The man then left the structure and went out into the din of the hovels, the little child, Alm, tailing him with a numb expression. 

The hovel Alm lived in represented a small community of perhaps 12 people a mile outside the walls.

It was close to winter, and the biting cold stung the sparsely dressed Alm. 

Alm, shivering and breathing on his little hands as he walked, eventually asked, "Dad... Where are we going?"

There was no answer from the man who walked ahead of him. 

Alm turned back and looked at his tiny hovel, surrounded by three meter tall grass on every side except the one facing the other smattering of dirt hovels, and began to feel a sinking feeling in his stomach. 

As they walked, they quickly left the small smattering of dirt huts and entered grass so tall and dense that it couldn't be seen through, pushing it apart and fighting it every step. After a while, Alm started to hear the sounds of a river, and as they walked further, a large river, raging and tempestuous but shallow and mellow at the edges, emerged from the grasses along with a small semi-circular clearing with a single deathly looking tree. 

The man grabbed Alm's head and pointed his face towards a bucket near the lone tree, lifting his arm and pointing at it. The man then left, slipping off into the grasses again. 

Sighing, Alm trudged over to the bucket, picked it up, and filled it with water before heading back to the grasses in the direction of his hovel; His day had began. 

After many hours of hoisting water, a small pool in the middle of the hovels had been filled. 

A small, rail-thin lady covered in threadbare cloth walked out, her face old yet young, and her body full of youth yet dying. She looked at the pool and then looked at Alm, and she said, "Good work."

She then walked back to her hovel some small distance away, softly humming some forgotten tune. 

Alm stared at her as she walked away, and just as he turned to go back to his own hovel, he heard her soft voice say, "Aren't you coming?" 

Alm glanced back at her. He knew her small hut was having a tiny fire just outside of it, making it far warmer than his own could ever be. Alm saw her figure slowly getting smaller as she got further, and he then trudged over behind her, hearing the crackling of the fire before he saw it as he went around another's hovel. He got there as she sat in front of the fire just outside of the entrance to her hovel, a grassy weave forming the semblance of a blanket in her hands. 

"Sit," she said. 

Alm sat. 

"Pray."

Alm cusped his hands, and so did she. 

"To our god.... Thank you for gifting us with life. Thank you for this fire."

And so they sat there for a minute with their hands clasped in front of the fire, ruminating on that statement with their eyes closed before the woman opened hers. 

'Her thoughts, whatever they may be, must have be reverent' is what Alm thought.

And Alm's thoughts were not as much reverent as they were resentful. 'I have heard stories.. There are people who are not always cold.. There are people who are not always hungry.. There are people with... With mothers, even here.. Why, god?.. Why?'

And then Alm's thoughts stopped because the woman brought out a little piece of bread. 

She said, "for your hard work, Alm. Thank you." And then she passed him the piece of bread.

Alm took it into his hands. The bread was black, and it was as hard as some of the rocks he had found by the river when collecting water, but Alm felt overcome by gratitude. 

"Thank you for this bread."

The lady shook her head, and then she quietly continued to weave her grassy blankets while Alm gnawed on and tried to grind down the rock-like bread with his small teeth. 

Many hours later, Alm is in his hut, and a man creeps in and settles next to his sleeping form, laying on the cold, hard dirt floor and staring at his son with some emotion that flickers across his eyes. 

A tear races across his face and disappears just as quickly as a shooting star, and then the man shuts his eyes and sleeps. 

The next day, Alm is awoken in much the same way as the first. 

"Get up."

*kick*

And so the day's work begins though this time it is work requiring the gathering of the long stalks of grass that are ever-present. 

Alm headed to the edges of the tiny hovel community, the only clearing not covered by dense, corn-maze like grass, and he clasped and ripped at the grass. He then took bundle after bundle that he formed and placed it in a special hovel, one meant for storage. And after three hours, a pile had formed, the pile of old dry grass next to it looking small by comparison. 

Done with his work, Alm collapsed in the storage hut, his butt on the cold floor. Looking around its inside, he saw shelves lined with little herbs, and on the corner of one shelf, a strange looking rock. 

It was rectangular, and had the strangest carvings on it, yet it was too high to reach. 

Filled with curiosity and glancing around at the lower shelves, Alm hoisted himself up onto one and placed a tiny little foot on the lowest shelf, bringing himself up to the shelf that had the strange rock. 

Grasping it and tugging it, the rock was far too heavy to move for little Alm, and so all he could do was stare at the image carved into its wide front - a man in a cross legged position, breathing deeply. 'This rock.... It feels like no other rock I've felt before. It's... Warm and soft, but firm.'

Staring and prodding at the rock for several minutes, Alm was eventually interrupted by a small man coming into the hovel, heaving a large fish onto a little rack meant for drying. 

The small man looked up at Alm clinging to the shelf and looking at the rock. The man smiled, and his small, wiry frame mustered up a chuckle before he walked out of the hovel, saying as he went out, "it's good to be interested in that, and it would bless us all if you could learn from it."