And I wouldn't change a thing.

One day you wake up & realise you're the disapointment?

The Crooked Man has come, with his mocking smile & his enigmatic words...

The Crooked Man's face contorted as he forced the word out. His lips cracked and a little blood trickled from the wound, for he only had a little time left to shed.
'Listen to me,' he said. 'Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperatley want to return. It is a place of pain & suffering & grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women & children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives & children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes & shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will still fight one another & hurt one another & maim one another, because that is what they have always done.
'And even if you do avoid warfare & violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health & beuty & then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about- lovers, children- will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old & sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesignt will fade, and your skin will grow lined & aged. There will be pains deep within you that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you & there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you will pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead, you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death comes and beckons you into his darkness. The life you left behind is no life at all. Here you can be king, and I shall allow you to age with dignity & without pain, and when the time comes for you to die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awaken in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven...