for his father had told him that was the only avenue by which he might gain the Guild’s acceptance. Just what was the truth of what happened to your father those days after his Arsowuent? And what might that have to do with you, you might wonder, for that was an event in the life of your father, not yours, one that took place in his youth, and that was long ago.
Well, my dears, the truth of that has everything to do with you, for the need to champion his cause shall fall to you in your time. While that time is perhaps a long way off in the future, I suspect that someday, in pursuit of your own quests, you will want to know whether your father was what the people who’d waited for him claimed him to be. You may ask him, but he will not say; he says there’s no way to know.
I have spent my days scouring these Worlds to find out more of his story, the bigger picture and the frame upon which it all unfolded so that you might better understand your father and what he did, and from that do what you must do when your time comes.
I’d love to tell that story to you in person, here in the great desert of Tomossio when we gather at night to listen to the tales of travelers. That remains an impossibility. Instead, indulge me and imagine yourself here with me outside the tower of my residence.
Imagine yourself on a plush Zoufrenian carpet, your body wrapped by a blanket woven of the finest fibers, beneath the deepest-black, most star-studded sky you could ever see. Feel the crisp night air fill your lungs. Taste the frathmum smoke as it rises in the firelight, its scent soothing and relaxing. Overhead, moordoks circle, crying now and then their shrill call as they wait, impatient, for the fires to extinguish and us to crawl off to sleep so that they may claim the uneaten remnants of our feast. These are not left mistakenly, but are a ritual offering, our oblation to the White Light Beings. In that, I get far, far ahead of myself. The story surrounding your father has no proper beginning, either in time or place, and should you ever seek to get at details I have missed, for certainly there must be many that escape me, your investigation would lead to people and events that took place two thousand years ago, so long is the chain of circumstances that shaped your father’s actions.
I had thought that my telling would begin with Abbess Gjolla of the Monastery delle Cinsurelles when she received that most unexpected visit from the three Royal Guards of the House of Turquoise. I thought also to begin with the day I made a fateful decision to receive a Royal Lord in my private chambers when I was young, though not as young as you, and lived in the City of Spires. I considered not beginning in our time at all, but in the time of the Ancients, with the destruction of the palace of King Idahôn of Grejoria, Emperor of all the Worlds for a thousand years.
For far too many sleepless nights I wrestled an endless uprising of notions about where to begin until the imperative to start drove me to mark a set of gorthrinel feathers, each representing a starting point. I raised the feathers high and dropped them to the table. My eyes shut, I felt among them until one compelled itself to me. I took it and without question began the story as directed, for I dare not question a selection made by the Goddess of Chance.
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