The Storm Front – Chapter 11

*Scene 01* 3:46 (Troll’s Touch)

“Hush up!” a breathless voice came out of the dark, “It’s just me. We have to keep quiet. I don’t know if they followed me or not, but we can’t stay here much longer.” Laura lowered the knife, as she realized it was Christie. “What? We can’t go out in that? What did you find in the cabin?” “You really don’t want to know.” “You’ve got to tell me.” Even now, back in the stable with Laura, she was still panting, her heart was racing as she had made to run and flee around the back of the hill that formed the back wall of the cabin. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears like a kettle drum. Her temples throbbed, her adrenaline spiked, but the storm and rain fought her as she had slid and foundered, trying her best to get back to Laura before the two Trolls could make it to the stables. She had not been the direct victim of the troll that they had encountered before, but catching only that brief glimpse of those darkened and drilling eyes spoke volumes of the degree of terror that Laura may have endured under its direct gaze. The probing mind behind it was feral and ugly, in a way, that she could not easily put into words. It seemed to tug at her consciousness for a half-second and then lose its grip, and in that very brief moment, she understood why Laura might want to leave this place and never come back. She rubbed her arms with her wet and cold hands, trying to wipe the slimy feeling from them. An oily slickness that she knew was not manifested in actual grime, but in the odd lingering mental touches of that fiend, seeking to seize hold of her. She had believed she had been somewhat brave before, with charging the creature and pulling the bag over its head, but now she felt only shaky and uncertain. Terrified, to some extent on what might have been, had she hesitated and received the full glare of the creature. In naïve ignorance, she’d told Brian that she would willingly fight trolls with him. Now, as she struggled to catch her breath, trying to decide just how much she should tell Laura of what she had seen, she realized how foolhardy and reckless it was to commit to an action without first gaining a respectful understanding of just what she would be risking. Christie steadied her breathing and swallowed, finally focusing on Laura and responding to her fearful question. “I wish I didn’t, but you are right. I do. We’ve just got to make sure they didn’t follow me.” “Who? What didn’t follow you? Tell me!” “Trolls. There are two of ’em in the cabin. Maybe three. I don’t really know. One of them was really black, and….” Before she could finish the statement, it dawned on her what the third, black thing was that now lay scorched and suppurating with blistered and roasted flesh upon the table in the cabin. “Oh, no.” “What?!” Laura pleaded, fear already bending the pitch of her voice into a higher shrill squeak of terror.” “What?!” “The third figure was a body. Burned black and covered with charred clothing and…” “The Troll we killed,” Laura squeaked, already beginning to swoon and sway, so that Christie had to rush to catch her before she fainted.

*Scene 02* 5:37 (Wisdom Walk) )

I walked with Miray along a narrow footpath encircling the Hill of Skulls.  The sky was darkening and the area beyond the eastern slope leading toward Crowe became more bruised and angry.  Distant lightning cast a surreal pallor over the land, and my concern for the two women became more and more evident. A cold air mass pushed up from the valley below condensing into fists of white that slammed its foaming knuckles into the rising warm air front coming inland from the eastern sea.  Giant roiling pillars formed from the impacts of the tangled thermal onslaught. They towered into the sky, pushing upward with the hill-cresting winds like grey billowing mountains of smoke driven before a colossal and unseen snowplow.   A frothy squall-line edge of rain and frost roiled in the heavens, backlit by the strobe light of crackling lightning and rumbling thunder. Whatever was about to break loose would come down hard, fast, and furious.  The hiss of distant rain and ticking of sleet sighed over hill and valley, sweeping towards the slopes and fields of the highlands.  This gathering storm was unlike anything ever heard of or seen back in the Surface World, and I wondered what true forces were driving these colossal weather patterns towards such an angry display of wet, wind, and cold. Miray trod silently beside me, trying to match my stride by stepping wide, but she was having difficulty keeping up.  I held her little hand in a grasp stronger than perhaps I should and I realized my own restlessness was causing her difficulty. “I am sorry, Miray. I’ll slow down for you,” I said quietly. “It’s okay. You were helping me step bigger than I could do alone.” I smiled and looked down at her, seeing that one of her shoelaces had come untied. “Want to stop for a bit?” “Okay.” I knelt down in front of her as she plopped down on a flat stone. “Here, let me help you with that,” I said taking her dirty shoelaces in my hands and beginning to tie them. “What did you mean back there?” “Back when?” “About feeling The Marker Stone. That I was forgiven.” “Oh, that.  Well, I can hear it talking to me.” “What do you mean talking to you? What does it sound like?” “It doesn’t sound.  It just talks.  You know, like inside me.  In a place only I can hear it. I feel the Stone talking, but no one seems to be listening to it. They are being too loud to hear it.” “And what does it say to you?” “That what you knew before, you have forgotten. That forgiveness isn’t just for the small stuff.  It’s for the big stuff too. And that you have forgotten that because you want to carry it, but it is too heavy for you.” I focused on smoothing the loops on her sneakers, a lump rising in my throat, and feeling nascent tears forming. “Did you really do the bad things you said?” she asked, her voice seeming so small. I nodded with a deep sigh and looked up at her. “Yes, I did. Many years before.” “Did you get a spanking for it?” I smiled in spite of the seriousness of the topic. “Yes,” I said, “I guess you could say that.” Miray looked down and the loops hanging and then back at me. “Tie up the bunny ears.  My feet are short rabbits.” “What?” “My daddy always ties up the longer loops so they won’t come loose so fast,” she pointed, “He says my feet are little bunnies, and their ears should not be so long when they have to hop a long way.” I resumed, grabbing the loops as she instructed, and tied them together once more to her satisfaction. When I had finished she said, “Mister O’Brian, if you have said what you did, and are sorry for it, and promise not to do it again, you don’t have to have droopy ears when you hop along.” Of course, she was right, and the simple, yet profound truth of it came to me in that moment. Confession makes no difference if there is no surrender, and no exchange of the burden from the guilty to The One equipped to carry it.  As long as we try to make amends for it by our own effort, we are preventing the very help that would free us. Even as the realization came, I felt a burden lift off of me, and a feeling of lightness lift my spirit.  Twenty-one years, I had lived under that weight, and now, through the perceptive words of a small child, I felt the self-imposed chains my guilt fall off. “You are wise beyond your years, kiddo,” I said helping her back to her feet.

*Scene 03* 5:50 (Storm and Horses) )

“No, no, no, no!” Laura held the sides of her head, struggling to contain the horses of her own panic that were starting to run.  Her heart pounded, her muscles throbbed with the rush of adrenaline, as her respiration wheezed in and out of her nostrils like a chugging locomotive. Christie had thought to catch her in a swoon, but was rebuffed as Laura sprang to her feet.  Her horse reared, at last kicking through the weathered board that had solely kept it in the broken stable stall.  The horse bolted, plunging between Christie and Laura, its eyes walley-eyed and wild, rimmed white with fright. Without thinking, Laura grabbed for the saddle horn, her foot finding the stirrup, and as the beast lunged forward into the storm, the forward momentum carried her with it, swunging into the saddle. Christie grasped for the loose reins of the animal to turn it back, but the wind and wet blew the slick leather out of reach.  She aimed for Laura’s leg and the stirrup finding it way to Laura’s other foot as it sought for the hardened loop. The surging horse spun, almost slinging Laura off as she frantically fumbled for the wet reins, catching the horses mane instead. Lightning cracked and blazed in the overhead sky, strobing the ground with ghost light.  Mud sucked at the horse’s stamping hooves, as pool and puddles sloshed and spattered grime and dirt into Christie’s face and mouth, and she held fiercely to the horses stirrup, dragged bodily through the puddle, barely missing the crushing jackhammer of the horse’s iron shod feet.  The animal bucked and kicked. Laura gripped the mane, burying her face in it, blinded by the pelting rain and flashing light of the angered sky. The horse spun again, dragging Christie from the stirrup, battering her body with its muscled flanks and whipping tail.  Christie could not see, but her arm strained and torqued with the motion.  A hard hoof grazed her back bruising her and scraping fresh wounds where she’d been abraded before during the rocky graveled struggle with the troll.  She felt the stirrup slip out of her white knuckled, feeling her own fingernails dig into her dirty palms. “No!” she screamed, as both Laura and the frighten steed bolted out into the storm.  Jagged etchings revealed the wind racked land under the boiling sky.  A rider in black under a heavy billowing cloak was fastly approaching from the far end of the small stream, the stead punching pools of water along the ground, that took on a phosphorescence, under the animal’s hooves. Christie rolled off of the ground quickly, her breathing a staccato, buried within the tympany rumble of the rolling thunder.  “No, no, no, no, no!” she wailed in defiance, as she charged back into the broken stable, catching the reins of the stamping mare she’d been given. In seconds she was in the saddle, her knees locked tight against the shuddering body of the animal, her fists slapping the horse’s flank with the loose end of the reins, her heels cocked back into its flanks. She and the mare bolted out of the stable, its hooves and foreleg shattering the remaining board ajar in the stable gate, pulling down the leaning support post of the old structure.  As Christie and her mount crossed the threshold, the roof of the stable came crashing down behind her. Rats squealed as stone balasters topped into the area, crushing them under the falling debris. Curtains of wet, drenched the night, as the dark rider from the stream’s edge arrived, thundering out of the night.  It shouted something unintelligible, as Christie and her horse galloped away, enfolded into the sodden curtains. Lightning kindled its strobing flame, ionizing the air with dangerous charges she could feel prickling her wet skin.  Her horse was running blind.  The air buffeted them, as the animal churned under her plunging into what looked like a nest of vipers. She shrieked, as they slithered around her, and writhed at the horses chest as it surged into them.  Water sloshing in white foam. They were in the river.  The vipers stiking them. Entangling them. Threatening to drown them.  They were a mass of squirming terror, their barbed fangs tearing at her body, their tongues silver and…leafy. Clarity struck her for just a moment and she realized that these were not vipers, but vines that had rolled down into the river running along the front of the cabin.  The surge of the water stun her body with the cold, the mass of tangled vines fighting their forward progress, but she felt the horses feet gain purchase at the bottom of the stream and stomp shakily at the smooth stones that clacked and snapped beneath them. The black rider reared his horse on the white-grey bank of the river, the lightning scintillating off of his drawn sword.  A sputtering yellow glow did little to contribute light or clarity to the diorama before her, but she did seem to see two squat figures emerging each holding their own blades. A jolt trembled through Christie as she felt the horse angle upward, stamping its way out of the net of the soddened vines, emerging onto the bank. Darkness closed over the scene on the far shore as her horse spun out of the mat and pointed its terror-driven run forward into the eastward incline towards the sea beyond it.

*Scene 04* 2:08 (A Glimmer of Hope)

The distant hillside range stood out in pale relief against a darkening sky.  Begglar and Nell’s Inn lay just over the rise in a leveled turnabout, where the mud-packed mule track and rutted roadway descended down into the high-mesa village of Crowe. The storm bruised and swelled the bludgeoned sky with hammers of thunder and peals of jagged lightning. “We’ve got to move the group to shelter,” I said, taking Miray’s hand, “Storm’s coming.  I hope the girls took cover.” “What’s that?” Miray asked, pointing westward towards the distant mountains, barely visible along the horizon. I looked where she was pointing and then kneeled down where I could see from her line of sight. A blue glimmer shone from the far western horizon.  Its radiant beams, incredibly, reached out to us, dancing in atmospheric refractions on the manmade hill at our backs. It had been so long since I had seen the effect that it took me a moment to realize what we were witnessing.  And then I was certain.  The Praesporous stone. “That, my dear Miray, is where we need to get to.  There are not many places in the Mid-World from which one can see that light, but this is one of the few.” “Is it Excavatia?” “Yes. The gateway to Excavatia is there. That is where the great crown now resides.  Where the terrible dragon took it long ago to the furthest place it could.  The beast cannot bring it out of these lands because this Marker Stone has a hold on it.  A prior claim to it.” Miray pondered my words for a minute and then asked, “Like a magnet?” “Yeah. Something like that, kiddo,” I smiled at her perceptiveness, “There are many waves of a kind of magnetism in this Mid-World.  Some bring good things, some bad. It’s complicated.”

*Scene 05* 6:36 (Losing the Edge)

The group had begun to take sides. Begglar could clearly see the seeds of division being sown. And with sprouts and tender shoots of dissension appearing through the soil this early into the calling to a stone quest, he knew that was a very bad sign. O’Brian had long struggled with self-doubt since the night he and Caleb had broken trust with Jeremiah. It was a struggle that plagued him up until the night he left the Mid-World, in what Begglar had thought was a departure for good.  At least, in O’Brian’s mind, anyway. Somehow, Begglar felt that one day he would be back. Anyone called by The One to come to join a Stone Quest in the Mid-World, would not be able to walk away from it easily. Especially once they had given their name to a leader. There were ways, but most involved dying in the Mid-World. And O’Brian left it, still very much alive, though most of the dark forces, among men and beasts, still believed otherwise. They believed they had won. That they had eliminated the threat of the prophesied quests of The Surface World Seekers, once and for all. They had gloated and reveled in their triumph. They were cautious at first, gaining only that arrogant confidence once two successive seven-year cycles had passed without further incident or any indication of otherworld intrusion. The Oculus had not reappeared, and the troops stationed and encamped along the sea walls were finally withdrawn and returned to Xarm City to regroup, amass strength and prepare for more concerted efforts along the pathway towards war.  Concerted efforts which began as a siege upon the more prominent merchant city of the upper highlands.  The city of Azragoth, located in the shadow of the high mesa, within the forests of Kilrane. Yet Azragoth had not succombed to the pillage and rule of Xarm.  Azragoth had fallen to plague. It was, rather the towns of the lower plains that took that dubious position of subservience and had only succumbed to Xarmnian rule and oppression, in the backlash of Azragoth’s demise. The demoralization of it fall led others to believe that The Resistance was dying out. The will to Hope in the promise of The Marker Stone was reduced to smoldering embers, that barely flickered anymore. Even he and Nell had gone into hiding.  Jeremiah was nowhere to be found but only rumored to be present somewhere lurking within the Forests of Kilrane. He, like O’Brian, had abandoned the prior quest, after the fateful night that the Cordis Stone had been lost to The Pan and his Half-Men Kingdom of hybrids. One by one, those of the prior company had been picked off and slain. Somehow The Pan had found a way to use the Cordis Stone to its vicious advantage until suddenly it all ended. Rumor had it that The Cordis Stone it possessed finally went dark and became just another worthless stone.  With the whispered failure of such a stone of virtue, said to be the greatest of them all,  it seemed that Evil had won the day. Begglar knew that there may still be a few of the fourteen of his prior company, that still might be out there in the Mid-World.  Hidden, or perhaps they had all gone back to The Surface World, rather than face the prospect of being eventually discovered and systematically slaughtered, or betrayed by any one of the thousands of  Mid-Worlders who no longer believed in the hope-filled prophecies. He’d only lost the tell-tale signs of his former origin, by fully committing himself to permanent residency and the love of his bride, here in the Mid-World. Nell and Jeremiah had both been present at the ceremony, as was someone very old, from the Surface World when the land of the Surface had not yet undergone its ancient baptism.  The mysterious man, O’Brian had alluded to in his confession before The Marker Stone. In the joining ceremony, they had all been given his full birth name as witnesses, in a very special place deep within Kilrane.  A mysterious bower of sorts, attended by mysterious guardians of light. And there he had been bonded into oneness with a Mid-World beauty and took upon himself her residence and mysteriously yielded that strange characteristic that made clear his former origin to others like her–an edging, that non-Mid-Worlderer were unable to see for themselves, but was ready identified by those native born into the betweening realm. Since that time, he had only once returned to the Surface World, on the behalf of one person and for a brief time only, for he soon learned that it was dangerous to remain in his prior world with the “edging” that revealed him to now be a foreigner there. A light silvering shimmer around his form, like that of sunlight’s edge along a high cloud.  By contrast, these Surface Worlder’s shown a darkling edge around them, as if their form was rimmed in an edge of shadow for which there was no apparent lightsource.  It was only visible up close, but any Mid-Worlder who had encountered a Surface Worlder would recognize that difference within getting within ten feet of them. The company of travelers had no knowledge of this characteristic that each of them bore, except perhaps two of them.  It was a mystery about those two.  Both were clearly Mid-Worlders.  Both had refrained from entering the inner chamber within the Hill of Skulls.  Both had lingered in the dark passage, unaware that he’d marked them but neither he nor Nell had called attention to it.  It wouldn’t do to reveal their difference, if they did not at first determine the reason for their assumption that they could blend in with the company. Unless they too did not know about the “edging”.  Which was quite possible, since it had been so long since Mid-Worlders had encountered Surface Worlders, and there were so few of them that still remained to show that difference.

*Scene 06* 5:12 (Run to Sea)

Gusts of wind pummeled Christie as she held tightly to the horse running beneath her at full gallop.  She was blind, the land seemed alive beneath her, jumping into relief and falling into shadow with each strike of the lateral lightning crisscrossing the angry sky above her. She ducked low beneath the bobbing head of the mare that ran across the trembling landscape, squinting as hard drops of rain pelted her body like viciously cast marbles thrown by a petulant brat angry at his recent loss of the game. She could see no sign of Laura, and she was running blind, losing the hope of ever finding her again. A loud crack ripped open the heavens and seemed to dump a veritable waterfall down upon her, through a gaping fissure beneath its vast reservoir. Her horse screamed in protest, its pace quickened by its terror.  Begglar had said these horses knew their way to the sea, but she did not figure that applied in such a terrible thunderstorm which was gaining in strength by the minute. Under the rumble of a thousand sky drums, Christie thought she heard the answering shriek of another horse far ahead.  A prick of hope that she might miraculously locate Laura within the storm. How long had they been out in this?  Thirty minutes, an hour, maybe two.  Time seemed to run counter to the speed of her horse.  The stinging wind and wet and erratic dance of electric light and dangerous darkness piled misery upon misery.  Her skin burned with the cold, her clothing scratched with threaded claws against her body, gripping her with slick, wet fingers. A burst of white light, strobed out of a column of opalescent fire.  Irregular shapes of the rocky cliffside shed their shadows and stretched skyward, meeting the cloudburst under the clap of thunder. Christie’s vision burned with the distant negative image of a lone horse running riderless along the crest of the cliffside.   It had to be Laura’s.  No animal would willfully be out in this.  Only people were that foolish. As her horse approached, Christie could hear the sounds of thousands applauding, like a roaring crowd at a massive stadium, in ecstatic celebration of some field of play.  Or a coliseum of blood-thirsty spectators, witnessing brutal gladiatorial conflict in an arena below. Christie’s horse turned, as it reached the cliffside, running laterally in the direction that the other horse had gone.  The sea below the cliff was a frothy churn of milk, striking the collection of stone reefs, sending spouts of spray high into the air.  The beach was bearded with phosphorescent seafoam, iridescent and deluged, the shoreline pushed relentlessly against the cliff’s edge, swallowing the strip of sand under rolling surf. Christie grappled for a better grip on the horse’s reins and pulled hard to the left, turning the terrified horse back from following route Laura’s maverick mount had taken. Somewhere Laura had fallen.  She could be hurt or even worse.  Her body could have plummetted from the cliffs into the swirling waters of the sea below. Christie struggled to see through the salted sting of the sea air, buffeting her against the bluffs as they curled upward along the battered brow. The horse was exhausted and finally slowing, but it trembled and protested, bobbing its head in fright, struggling against the bit that halted its forward progress. Christie quickly scanned the churning waters below and then the area ahead where the land sloped upward from the seaside.  Another strobe of light tore across the sky causing the scene to jump in projection.  Something glowed from the far side of the bend in the curving shore. Christie goosed her mount forward, loosening the drawn reins, allowing her horse to gallop up the rise towards the turned inlet.  As the terrain rose higher, the winds became more ferocious, attempting to hide from her the source of the glowing light ahead. As the animal thrust upward upon the upper cliff, Christie gasped, ingesting salty spray that burned her mouth and throat. Effused in a bluish corona of light, the large rim of the Oculus spun against the spray of the storm, casting a pool of light ahead of its path inward toward the land.  Wet sand dunes glowed like strange lady-finger cookies toward the large ring of light, almost as if they were the hands of a bride extending her fingers outward to accept the glimmering wedding band offered by the powerful hand of her beloved groom. The seafoam churned around the sandy dune that would soon become an atoll, and then descend within the chiffon lace of the sea’s billowing bridal gown. A small figure moved back and forth under the glow of the approaching light, stumbling and then rising along the crest-effused dune. Laura. It could only be her. When the Oculus ring closed over the finger of the dune, the sea around it mysteriously calmed. When the oculus withdrew back into the sea, the lone figure was gone.

*Scene 07* 9:23 (Begglar’s Rebuke)

The pull of the stones were complicated, yet simple. There was parts of the human psyche designed to respond to each of the “virtue stones” represented within the Mid-World quests. Each connected to purpose and existence. How could one move through adversity without hope? How could they be sustained in the journey without love? How could they reach a place of confidence in the certainly of hope and the assurance of love without faith? Each stone brought one closer to the final realization of Excavatia, but it also brought Excavatia to them: A kingdom coming and a coming into the kingdom. I realized that the distant glimmer of the Praesporous stone might give these in my charge an assurance that what both Begglar and I had told them was true. A sighting of the Hope Stone’s glimmer might be just the thing to break through and remaining hesitancy to follow onward and join me in the quest. Hope. They needed something desparately to hope in. Seeing the goal ahead might assure them that a destination was real. That a finish line did exist before they lined up to run the race. Miray and I followed a foot path around the back of the hill, encircling the great mound heading back to the others. They had only had a few minutes to discuss my role in their estimation, but seeing the Praesporos Stone from a distance, might turn the odds in my favor, so Miray and I boldly headed back. As we approached I could overhear someone asking, “But why didn’t he tell us all of this before?!” “Yeah, why can’t you lead us?” another interjected. “Guys!” I waved to them as Miray and I approached. “O’Brian!” Begglar turned, a mild look of irritation on his face on my not waiting to be called. “I think there is something over here you all should see,” I said, shrugging slightly as Begglar put his hands on his hips. “We’re not through talking,” Cheryl turned towards me, her face also showing irritation. The younger dark-haired girl, whom I had heard addressed as Becca, smirked at me, holding Cheryl’s hand. “Yeah, we didn’t call you, yet,” she added, making sure to keep me in whatever place of derision she held me in. “But there is one of the quest stones… I mean,” I fumbled, “one of the quest stones can be seem from this location.” “What do you mean seen?” a young man looked at me dubiously, folding his arms. “We saw it,” Miray chimed in, rescuing me yet again. “It shines blue in the distance. O’Brian says ‘Exclamation’ is there.” “Excavatia,” I corrected gently. “Excamatia!” Miray rejoined. “I’ll bet he did,” a young teen gufawed. “Come and follow us,” I encouraged them, “We can show it to you.” Begglar shook his head at me almost imperceptively, and I gave him a quizzical look. “O’Brian, I dunna think that tis a good idea right now,” he cautioned me, but I could not figure out his hesitancy. “Come on!” Miray beckoned. “Stop being scaredy!” she insisted. An older man shrugged and said, “Well, let’s have a look then.” Grudgingly the group came towards us, Cheryl and young Becca hand in hand, Nell following, looking worried. “O’Brian!” Begglar called to me, “a word, if I may.” I nodded, and Miray took the lead, heading the procession back to the point toward the side of the hill facing the western horizon, happy to lead and prove her point and faith in me had been warranted. As the others filed past me, Begglar took me aside and whispered quietly, “I dunna think this is a good idea just now.” “You’ve said that. Why not?” I countered. “Cause they may not be able to see it,” Begglar hissed, “They’ve no given you their names.” “What does that matter? The Praesporpus Stone is still out there in the Crown. You and I both saw it there! Don’t you remember?” “Aye!” Begglar growled, “But you and I both had been committed in the quest. We gave our names to Jeremiah that first day here,” he gestered toward the Hill and more importantly to what was inside. “I still don’t understand why that matters,” I raised my hands palms upward. “It figures, ya don’t,” and here he knuckled my forehead, “but you don’t understand that the Praesporous, the Hope Stone, is visible to those that are committed. The fairweathers are blind to the gleaming of Hope, if they have not the faith to commit themselves to the truth. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe. A wicked and foolish generation seeks for a sign, and you’ve gone and pandered that to them. If you start trying to prove yerself to them, you will have to do it over and over again, and it signals the doubt you carry in your own heart. If a man does not believe in his own cause, why then should he wonder if others see the doubt within him and also fail to believe?” The import of Begglar’s words rang true, like the striking of a hammer on an anvil, and I realized that I had made myself that anvil, and my ears were ringing with the tintinitus of his rebuke. “I hadn’t considered…” I began. “No, ya havena considered, because you’ve been away for too long. You’ve forgotten that these stone quests are a matter of honor and faith. A determination to see through eyes other than what your natural eyes would be made to see. Without faith, these quests are merely a pipe dream. Any manys the man an woman who’ve paid the price for that hard lesson.” I bowed my head in shame under his reproach. “What do I do?” “You better go and rescue that young lass, before she has here heart broken.” I nodded, and then turned to hurry after the crowd that has followed Miray. When I arrived, Miray had climbed up on the stone where we had tied her shoes, and was pointing westward. “It’s there,” she said, straining her arm, her finger outstretched. The group looked from her to the western horizon, shielding their eyes from the reddening sky, with puzzled looks on their faces. Young Becca, climbed up on the rock with her and looked hard in the direction she was pointing, and then squinted back at Miray. “I don’t see anything,” she said, turning back to the group. “Maybe her eye’s are bad,” she shrugged, hopping dramatically off the stone with a little skip. Cheryl looked from Miray to Becca, and then back towards the west, “Are you sure this is where you saw whatever you saw?” Someone in the group murmurred, “I highly doubt either of them saw anything beyond their own noses.” And here he indicated with his hand and finger a lengthening nose, making a whistle sound. One of the other girls giggled, and an older man grunted. The group turned to me, quizzical looks evenly distributed upon their countenance. “Have you been filling this young girl’s head with nonsense?” “Are you sure this is the spot where you say you saw this Pray…” “Praesporous stone,” I completed, looking beyond them clearly seeing the blue gleam and rays of light shining on the horizon, that they obviously could not. Miray looked at me with tears welling up in her eyes, “Why can’t they see it?” she ask, feeling the weight of unstated accusation, implying that both she and I might be lying to them. “Without faith it is impossible…” I whispered half to myself, and then came forward and help Miray down from the rock, unable to give her a satisfactory answer. “Let’s go,” I said to Miray as we turned away and walked back towards the front of the hill without another word. “And we’re supposed to follow that guy?” I overheard a man say to my back. High above, unbeknown to me or anyone else present, the rays of blue shown on a place on the slope of the place now dubbed the Hill of Skulls. Dirt and dust sloughed off of an area sliding down the hill uncovering a portion of the westward facing inner monolith. Upon that revealed surface were engravings written in a clear golden script. One of the words visible within that uncovered area was a single name: Miray.