Echoes on stone and ice
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 9829
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My name is Jarlath. Once, I might have claimed the lineage of House D'Honaire. Once, but no more. I gave up all rights to my legacy when I joined the mages of Ilxior. As long as I can remember, my father had a distrust of magick. Perhaps when he was young, he didn't, but between his youth and my birth something soured him against it. He disowned me when I set my feet upon the Path of Tears, and he died before we could reconcile. My name is Jarlath, but that is not what most know me as. They Call me Finder, Madman, and occasionally, Broken. At least those are the names they give me while they know I am in earshot. When they are unaware of my presence, I have heard them give me fouler names, ones I shall not repeat in this company. I don't mind what they call me, though. Much of it is true. Sometimes my skin burns as keenly as it did in the fall of the Tower. Though my wounds are long-since healed, the pain returns frequently to goad me on, when I have grown too complacent. It is a reminder of what I lost my eyes for. Some of the whispers of the townsfolk in any hamlet I pass through are inevitably about my eyes. They've noticed that I'm nimbler and far more aware than a blind man should be. Often, local thieves and panhandlers accuse me of faking my blindness to encroach on their "turf" The truth is far stranger. Every step I take, every word I say, I say from memory. I live life backwards from the lurid recollections burned onto my synapses the day the tower fell. Each footfall is exactly as I saw it in that fevered moment, exactly as I know it should be. I have done so for years, and the reason for my travels is nearly at hand. And it scares me, it fills me with dread. For I know where the visions end. Whether it be my death or merely the beginning of a new skein in the hands of the Fates, there is one thing I am deathly certain of. By the time I reach the Lost Grove, the visions will stop, and I will be truly blind once more... Lady Andrea Croix's claws scrabbled at the rock where Jarlath the Finder was but an instant ago. Righting herself, she took a deep breath. Her rage had brought out the contagion in her blood, the bestial freedom it granted caressing her nerves like a velvet glove. What threw off her cloak and the tattered remains of her clothing was an odd reflection of the young noblewoman. Her chestnut brown tresses, normally shoulder-length, streamed out wildly in the wind, locks reaching as far down as her waist. Shaggy brown fur covered her frame, reaching its thickest where it piled massively across her shoulders and back in hackles. She stood upright, though hunkered in a predatory stance, walking on the balls of her distended feet, relying on the busy, anxiously twitching wolf's tail which extended from her rump for balance. Finding neither sight nor scent of Jarlath, Andrea howled loud and long, her call echoing off of the monolithic structures. Sniffing the air once more, she finally caught scent of something in the ruins. It was not the mad mage, but it would have to do, her instincts told her as she broke into a run. Jarlath the Finder emerged from a most unlikely hiding place as he literally stepped from the stone itself. Sighing, he picked up the young noblewoman's cloak and brushed the snow from it. He'd known this was going to happen, and he knew all he had to do was wait for the next task before him, when Andrea, and her pursuit, inevitably headed back his way...
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The Traveler
5/31/2000 8:01:26 PM
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