BorealisValkyrie

THE WANDERER

Brisk, and yet silent as a starlit night would be over an arid drought. Such an eerie voyager, a wanderer, was traversing the boundless, vast magnitude of Harad’s wastes, unbeknownst to anyone who might have had the improbable skill and wit to spot his nimble steed across those lonely sands. Not that the sorry state of the desert would have made it more likely to meet southern folk, anyway.

The Third Age of the world had been welcomed with cheer and hope by the weary peoples of the West, relying on the profound confidence that shadows had been driven off the confines of all lands; the source of it, leastways. A shared dream of peace, but for the smouldering grudge that still endured and resisted in utter defiance beyond the extreme borders of the free realms, for below the verdure of kingly gardens or bustling quays lay the enormity of the South, and the vindictive spirits of all those who dwelt there and trod its inhospitable distances. Aye, revenge and unfinished disputes…
The overthrow of the Fiend had not meant the end of enmity betwixt the mighty Occident and the brutish minions that once would pay homage to the Dark; a lesser breed of Men, as was fabled among the courts inside stone and polished marble. In fact, a truce, though hopeful and coveted, will never signify true peace. The abeyance of skirmishes by the dunes and across the dwindling woods of the southernmost bounds, will never stand for lasting friendship. After more than fifteen centuries, large sections of these uncharted territories lived in deep silence, devoid of the warmth and sounds of human doings; bereft of life, really. Very few wish to inhabit troublesome places, and even fewer would dare the insidious treachery of hostile lands.

It was this solitude that our mysterious wayfarer was travelling through, beneath the nocturnal black that stretched far away unto every corner of the heaven’s vault. Ah, discerning his very thoughts and guessing the nature of his errands would have been hard matter even for the keenest intellect! Indeed, girt in long cloth and secure behind the poor guise of a chanced journeyman, he spurred the rein forth and, despite the haste which had gripped his interest, commanded his beast to increase the pace in the most resolute, gentlest manner. Covered by the unfathomable grey of his hood, this stranger proceeded without delay on his route, fearing not the cold that the very first hours of the day imbued wastelands with, because he was also certain that no animal, were it tame or wild, would have failed the sternness of his order and yielded to inclement weather. Actually, there were not many sentient beings who could pride in being unmoved by the force of so imposing an authority, either.
As the stars were glimmering, brightest, in the sky, the secret-ridden figure finally espied a solitary mass of ruins not very far from where he was advancing at full speed. It did not take the traveller very long to eventually get to the site. An even more enigmatic location it was: half-sunk in the sand, stood the remainders of what appeared to have been a temple in better times afore, prior to its inevitable decay. Portions of the outer wall still surrounded the main body of that decrepit edifice, but most of its inner chambers had either been shattered into pieces by some unknown incursion or simply surrendered to the passing of hundreds of years (thousands, perhaps). With the majority of the sanctuary’s own defences having been uprooted and rendered vain, it was an easy task for our errant pilgrim to dismount and make his way to the crypt of the ruinous building.

Yes, as he violated the sanctity of that ancient altar, the unbidden guest was slowly heading to somewhere he had fore-knowledge of. Something he had been querying and enquiring about for quite a time. An information which had been gleaned arduously through a number of peregrinations in foreign provinces, away from the comfort of regal mansions or tranquil lodgings. He was very much versed with the lore and tales being spoken of around the remote East, as thither he had often journeyed, spending several winters and summers in the company of outlandish populations, when his mind had not been occupied by thorough researches on the mode and customs that governed such far-flung regions. Now, however, he had been drawn south, where scorching suns betray the unwary foreigner, on a mission of his own into danger and mystery.
His foray had conducted him from tribe to tribe, leading the sage to ever unexplored swathes of southern parts, while he had been keeping himself distant from major cities, knowing that olden stories are best preserved and passed onto one’s kin outside the vanity of royal halls. Hence, his errand led him to the least of the lesser, according to the view of haughty generals and dissolute nobility, but there he needed to go, although the shining lustre of a court’s pleasures had never made him unhappy, anyhow. Then, during one of those trying wanderings, he had finally found it! He had found one whose name he had been recurrently referred to; a wise headman ruling over the scattered shreds of a once-renowned family. In a stormy vesper of the same month, he had wherefore come to it, to the village he had heard of. Once the few wardens at the entrance of the fence had escorted the mage inside, he was subsequently accompanied to a ragged, big tent, home to the man whom many believed knew what that queer explorer was looking for.

As had been those armed guards, the old, wizened ruler was caught by sudden surprise to know that the stranger spoke his tongue fluently, the sound of which would have beseemed coarse and extremely rough to western ears.

“I salute thee, wisest of all in the South! Hither am I come, against heat and unfriendliness, for much I seek the counsel of one who might be keen on granting sapience to a needy wanderer.” Thus had started the guest, and had then gone on with his cleverly-worded request, “I crave the help of a sapient mind, for wide used to go the legend: a spirit doth safeguard thy meridional folk, lord of blaze and ether!”

At first, the tribe’s regent had remained somewhat startled by the unexpected question coming from the mantled man in front of him, and by the reason why such an alien individual might want to delve deeper into the ken of his people; a person who looked so sinisterly interested into the object of his quest, to the point of daring to ask about a long-forgotten myth which only the desert’s desolation could unveil. Yet, as though stirred by some sort of newborn reverence towards that bearded sage, his resistance was met with augmented curiosity, as a sign that his mind was being changed. Who was that probing, beggar-like man? How did he speak their language so well? Surely, not one of the odious lords of the North; not even a spy, because his words had been lent with generosity, expecting a generous reply in exchange of courtesy. Treasonous ones could not have made it out of the waste alive. No, he had not come to harry the last days of an elderly chieftain, and thence he was likely to depart after his search would find fulfilment. He was genuine in his seeking; he had to be.

“Odd enquirer, you ask questions that few may answer, and seldom do we answer those we think are expert in stealth and wiles, but that you are not to my failing eye. Speak, please! What brings you so far from your abode? I might see if your scope shall be rewarded or not.”
“Liberal host, thy munificent manners surpass my fairest predictions! Verily, I am one musing on knowledge and seeking wisdom where none may find it. Long have I wandered, through death and peril, hoping that a wiser would come to my aid. Ill will I bring not, for no party I serve and there is nought whereover I exert power, save from my thirsty wit.”
“Water we are short of, down the arid places of the world, but some ken I have to quench your thirst, and, as we do say here, the kindly seeker’s plea ought to be made sought.”

Conquered by his disarming charm, as if in the grasp of an overwhelming spell, the ailing headman had begun to provide his guest with the truth behind those arcane legends of the past. In the meantime, furthermore, the quailing shape of the wanderer had almost turned into a tall, dignified presence, which seemed to have grown dramatically as the conversation between the two had gone on, revealing only slightly the white robes which the uncanny rover was clad in beneath his poor garb.
“Forsooth, a god we used to pray. Our guardian, our helper of yore. A creature that fire bore on menacing cloud. Faith was always there, beseeching him to rescue the southern folk from harm and destruction, although he manifested himself just in the rarest time, under the fashion of a bird of prey, the size of which one shall never set their gaze on about the shore.
Temples were raised to honour his might, until the sea-emperors came from foreign tides and brought our own sovereigns away from the preoccupations of the divine, for the mundane is the only care of vainglorious crowns, but the Dark Sire was worse than all and claimed to be the sole master of our fate, be it as tyrant or cruel deity. He laid waste to every shrine we had built in sweat and labour; no rival-god for him.
Almost nothing is left. Ware, nonetheless! A three-day journey hence, to the uttermost south, shall take you to a broad plain among the dunes; at night, search through the silence of those ways. Tale has it that a starry darkness may unearth some of what has foundered into the sand, while the moon waxes out and the above-orbs disclose their perennial radiance in all skies. The desert is ever loth to give away its hidden gems, especially to strangers, but precious heirlooms will show themselves to the worthy or to the cunning...”

As he had concluded his dense recounting, the aged shaman sped the traveller and bade him farewell. Once he had mounted his horse again, the fey rider bowed his head to take leave and rode off into the wilderness, never to be seen again.
Those lowly villagers would no more catch sight of their brief visitor, nor would they know if he had succeeded in his endeavours. Without a doubt, they would forever remember that very unusual person, and rumours soon spread that he might have been a portent of good luck or a benign apparition. Upon later remembrances, the gate-keepers recalled how that semblance of an adventurer did not bear any sign of age or infirmity, despite the depth of his penetrating stare and the thick beard. They could have sworn that he might well be a saint from abroad. They could have sworn that the staff he was leaning on hid some kind of potent artifice. They could have sworn that his melodious voice might have won the prestige of nations, moved the unmovable, and even bent iron and the earth’s most recondite enigmas to his very will.

So had the wanderer arrived where he most longed to be. Those he had listened to were not vague rumours: his three-day ride had taken him to said desolate valley. Lo and behold! The wreckage of a temple was truly emerging without, like a strand at the retreat of the sea. Though unsure whether the mute stone had much to tell or not, knowledge of the world’s unsolved riddles was his goal and ambition, since knowledge itself was, as he would put it, the real prowess.
Scattered murmurs of a lost tradition had sparked a veritable burning flame in him, with many evidences suggesting that such a story even the Elder Kin ignored. Who else would have reached forward to wrest that discovery from him? “This is lore which had better be kept in the hands of higher ones, instead of the memories of a fading, savage line,” he thought.

Content as he was, he started his slow, but incessant, procession towards that ruin. The central hall he believed had once served as the innermost, sacred space; the holiest room in the whole structure. That tribe-prince, who had so generously contributed to the finding of the relic, would never suspect that the exploring horseman did know of the existence of the temple and only required someone’s advice to guide him to the exact area.
He had come across it, one cloudless evening of spring, in one of his extenuating reads, drawing as much information as he could from the archive of the kings of Gondor, situated in the nethermost wing of the City’s library. The record spoke of numerous like sanctuaries, sparse all along the dunes, reporting the way in which western Men thought that the cult of the Bird had been somehow saved from extinction, though nigh-extinct it truly was. Written in the Elven-tongue, yet not by Elven-hand, the piece had posited that wide, hollow cellars had probably been carven into the ground to store the secrets of those hallowed mausoleums within. A crypt, its crypt, he was seeking.
It was night again, bleak as pitch, when the voyager entered that living memory of brick and pillar. Minuscule motes of debris, left in the chamber by the passage of erstwhile mishap, had risen from the bare floor, wafted in the air on the current of a swift breeze that was infiltrating the construction’s open skeleton. It was as if that misery had suddenly woken at the arrival of an intruder from outside and were thus trying to fend off the invader. A curtain of dust billowed high across the entire span of the vast room, to swallow the hooded figure in, but he did not relent at all. In the gloom of that decadence, he proceeded on to a section of the floor which seemed clear of both fallen stones and encumbering dirt. There was not a thing that did not exude the idea of lifelessness there, so to signal that the broken remnant of the shrine had little to offer to folk of any ilk, but any hope for concealment that those priests had had was soon vanished: whatever their skill in camouflage, the craft of a wizard would not have been defied so lightly. The traveller, then, held his staff high for a moment, as his mouth began to mutter indefinite formulas, and so hit the tattered ground with the end of his rod.
The stroke appeared to thud for an infinite amount of seconds through the deaf width of that dying place, as thunder would most obtrusively break the merriment of a sunny day.
After an instant that rather resembled the longest pause, the very floor cracked open right before his feet, digging a deep hole in the middle of the temple. Part of the collapsed base had covered the opening of the crypt, though leaving behind a moderately-spacious cleft that permitted entrance.

The flight of underground stairs, that wound ever lower from the upper surface, led the wanderer to the proof which so many had vainly set out to discover in former whiles. Into a smaller cave at the end of the tunnel had been set the statue of a winged beast, not taller than a medium-sized man in his prime. Its pinions were thrust forth from side to side, to convey the magnificence of that divinity; at its bottom, lit by the pilgrim’s staff (which had magically started to radiate light from the sphere at its top), other votive gifts had been brought on the idol’s pedestal, many of which mocked in miniature the appearance of that golden marvel. Indeed, the statue had been forged from the purest gold, whose gilded skin was now reflecting a tenuous gleam on the surrounding wall. It was on the near mural wall that paintings of old had been drawn with a certain type of dye, depicting an eagle-like god atop a storm, venerated by scores upon scores of devout worshippers, knelt in absolute, prostrate submission.

The seemingly-old man smiled out of utter pride and delight, having been able to surmount adversity and get to the final prize of his eventful journey. Stretching out his eager hand, he took hold of one of those miniatures and clasped it firmly, until the artefact disappeared into the sundry waves of his cloak, him being intent to carry tangible evidence back. He realised he had attained a wonderful feat, the like of which the other idle fellows of his noble order would not have even imagined possible. The sparse fables of sand-men were then proved true, and he was incredibly conscious that, one day, the knowledge he had been after with such forbearance would re-pay him well. Perchance, the time would be ripe for the Crimson Bird to come anew, as the run-down books of the White City inferred (books that mankind, squire or king, had long unlearnt to read), and the wiser sage would attempt to restore the forgotten religion, presenting himself as the Fire’s own emissary, or use the Southerner’s faith to his advantage, unless a much greater obsession had taken over his laborious mind.
Who could know?

“Aicanaroc,” murmured he with plain satisfaction, as though he had just added another gem to his personal collection of antediluvian tales. Then, ere the sorcerer turned and went back to the open world, he boldly remarked, “Yea, to me hath the desert shown! To me, worthy and cunning!”