Forge of Stones

  The marble road

  It was hunting time for the owls, the wild dogs and the wengals. He sat down on the cold, humid grass with his legs crossed and a walking stick on his left shoulder. He rummaged through his ever lightening knapsack for something to eat. With little fuss, he managed to come up with a meager meal: worrain berries and a piece of goat’s cheese, still fresh and spongy. He tried to feed as much on the land as possible, keeping most of his food supplies for the difficult part of his journey, the Widelands themselves.

  The people in the village he went through last were the usual sort in these parts: animal herders mostly, and a few wheat farmers. Simple people that prayed solemnly to the Gods every day, wishing not for riches and power, lands and wives or other things that spelled vanity beyond their grasp. They wished that their child be spared of illness and harm, their herds be still whole come morning, the snow be light, and the rain plenty before harvest.

  That was the sort of fools they were. He could feel sympathy like a man with sight feels for a man in the dark who has never seen golden fields in springtime and the piercing deep blue eyes of a young maiden, but nothing more. Even blind men wish for light to shine yet before their lives are ended. These folk just tread on, and never give things a second thought. He wouldn’t spare them more than a passing thought.

  His road was about to take him through the Widelands, an unforgiving place. Few had made the passing, and even fewer were left sane and unscathed in body, soul and mind once they did. There were stories and legends about the Widelands that were passed down from generation to generation, in many places and in many folk.

  Most of them, he had determined, were the superstitious tales of simpletons and madmen: mere fantasies for common people to spent the grinding, toiling days, thankful for their safe, ordinary, almost pitiful lives. Some were invariably twisted second and third-hand tales of those who had ventured somewhat into the accursed place and came back, surely not wholesome in spirit ever since.

  Fact and fiction were interwoven tightly in such accounts but some probable, shared truths could be distilled from the broth of rumblings, mutterings, and assorted hearsay that permeated the inns and taverns all across the Territories. There were even a few written accounts by people who seemed to have genuinely made the journey and lived to tell the tale, becoming rich and famous in the process. Most of them seemed to be very talented liars and writers, the distinction between their works of little significance.

  Only the Tale of Umberth could be counted as less than nefarious, since he set out with a hundred-score of men, of whom barely three survived: Umberth, his esquire Esphalon and a woman, then only a child, who Umberth claimed was found wandering alone, mute and dark-skinned, almost pitch-like in color.

  Umberth had spent the rest of his days and sizable fortune trying to organize further trips into the Widelands. He made a few unsuccessful efforts to present the girl as living proof of his sayings of underground cities, height-defying towers and huge arching constructs, but the girl could not even speak her name. Her skin color was a singular phenomenon that more often than not provoked the wrath of the Ministers and the aversion of the crowds, speaking of heresy against the Gods and the bastard offspring of heathens and beasts of old that the earth unveiled from time to time to test the faithful and attract the blasphemer.

  Not long afterwards the Ministry had declared her as well as Umberth heretics, a relentless manhunt together with the watchful, ever pious and dutiful believers of the Pantheon bore fruit and Umberth and the girl were beheaded and their bodies burned to ashes in Pyr, in the winter of the third pacificum, 153rd annum, 51 days before the Solstice.

  Esphalon, his esquire, had been sentenced to silence unto death and exiled never to utter a word in his life again, his tongue cut out. He had then wandered the northern lands, surviving on little more than worms and lichen, possibly wishing death for himself. It was while wandering the far north that he resolved to built a boat to travel to the End of the Ocean, and find the death he believed would free him of his troubled life.

  Strangely enough, he insisted in his work that he did build the boat, only to founder upon a land he had never heard of before, seemingly at first devoid of life. In those lands though he purportedly came upon a small tribe of nomads, wild men that knew not how to herd sheep and work with metal or clay, armed with wooden spears and no knowledge of fire.

  From what Esphalon later wrote down and described, when he was trapped and caught like animal prey probably destined for a savage death, be it a sacrifice or plain and simple cannibalism, the savages noticed while they searched his clothing a small hand-sized plaque of metal with no discerning characteristics other than a circular notch in its center, a memento from the Widelands. When they noticed that, Esphalon was greeted among them as an equal, a member of the tribe that was lost and suddenly found.

  He soon realized the importance of that plaque, and was further mystified. The savages used it to produce light and heat by placing an ordinary stone, even a lowly pebble, inside the notch. Pebbles and stones were the most widely used since they could be found in abundance in the northern rocky steppes were these people seemed to roam unhindered and unchecked. Sometimes they used animal bones or pieces of wood, mostly whatever was handy at the time.

  Invariably, the said item slowly seemed to shrink and then vanish into thin air in a matter of moments, and then pleasant sunlight and radiant heat would emanate from the plaque for hours to come.

  All this and much more was written in Esphalon’s memoirs, a compilation of the things he had seen and experienced in the wild lands coupled with what little time he had spent with the savages. The plaque remained with the savage men who would not part with it in any way. Esphalon made a new boat and managed to reach an isolated fishing harbor facing the Pangalor Sea, half-dead from starvation and exhaustion, losing a leg and three fingers from frostbite in the process.

  It was there where he wrote the Pangalor Scrolls, the single half-consistent work that contained enough about the Widelands to make it the most useful resource in an attempt to cross it, and perhaps uncover more about that mysterious land, as well as surviving long enough for others to know as well.

  His reverie was broken by the cries of a nighthawk swooping in to catch its prey, somewhere out in the star-lit fields of short grass and poppies swinging gently in the night breeze. He marveled at the arrogant precision and expert flying of the nighthawk which made no effort to catch its prey unguarded, but instead seemed to announce indifferently it was about to kill and then feast on a rather helpless and doomed animal.

  He smiled thinly and then got up on his feet fastening his knapsack on his back. He picked up his walking stick and set off down the marble road. He looked overhead and saw the nighthawk soaring triumphantly with a small snake writhing in its death throes, captured in the hawk’s beak. The nighthawk cried into the night once more and then disappeared over the distance, its faint silhouette mingled with the starry blue and black sky.