The Storyteller

Was there a time when stories meant nothing to us? Did our ancestors always huddle together whilst the unfathomed blackness of night hung outside and listen to the magic of words? Were they ever left alone with just their awful reality, bereft of the magic of imagination?

If there was such an arid eon, 'tis long forgotten. Yet men have come to treat the story with contempt, to treat a tale as mere entertainment. Now that the awesome night is conquered and civilisation has taught us there is naught to fear in its velvet depth, we huddle no more. Brashly, we drink and make merry whilst the bard and the teller of tales languishes on a side stage. His fantasy is no longer our truth, his pay not in love and honour but in cold gold.

Yet now and again, perhaps when the moon turns the colour of blood and the stars fall from their firmaments, a corner of our souls shivers. Perhaps we suddenly suspect that the old enemy is not vanquished, but has taken to the shadows our feeble lanterns feed, and therein lurks with power we cannot understand. Ancient, animal fears rise unbidden and despite our power, the world seems an alien place. Oft, at these times, a storyteller appears and once more we huddle to hear his words. When we listen with our hearts as at these times, the old comforts return and we hear the Truth once more. In stories, no matter how adverse the suffocating night, virtue brings the sunshine to us in final triumph.

Those primitive shadows lie heavy around Britannia these days. War, pestilence and greed have ridden forth upon their skeletal mounts, and the darkness reaches into many unprepared souls. Hearts are sorrowful, friendships are not renewed. Suspicion awaits all who relax their faith for a moment, and faith is challenged daily. Many have lost their homes to invasion, yet are still shunned by frightened neighbours.

Far from the home of their birth, a tribe of nomads has made their home in the unfamiliar woodlands of Yew. Trying to build their village, they have suffered attacks, suspicions and hatred. Yet their stories are still strong in their hearts and so they have endured, fierce, proud and unbowed. The glory of their deeds, individual and collective has fuelled their campfires and restored strength and honour to their disrupted lives. But now, as the twilight threatens all of Britannia, they seek Truth. Glory is not enough to sustain them in an alien land, cut away from hearth and home. Their hearts need to hear the tales of the old ways, the songs of the dead, the wisdom of their ancestors. Removed from the sacred grounds of their people, they cannot hear the comforting whisper of their forefathers. They need a storyteller.

The more so now, for strange portents have begun to follow them. Many moons ago, their Khan discovered a moss-covered stone chair, hidden away in a strange new land called Ilshenar. Drawn to the chair by unnatural signs, he uncovered writings upon the granite, writings in his own language. A language utterly alien, as he was, to any land in Sosaria. The writing flowed into a sentence without meaning:

Nine tents make your father's home.

Even the shamans of the tribe and certain Britannian scholars the nomads knew could not explain the presence or meaning of these glyphs. Nonetheless, the word "home" contained in the enigma caused great excitement.

Much time passed, and in the savagery of the orc invasions and the bestial response of the human Britannians to their effrontery, the conundrum was left aside. Then, in a search to restore their Khan, kidnapped from them by evil, the mask that held the sorcery which returned him whole, was seen to contain more such writing. A sage identified the wood that held the carvings as a tree-kin lost for a thousand years. How could this be?

Once again, the words graven into the crumbling black wood held form, but no sense. Chiselled into the rim of the mask, they ran round in a circle, no beginning, no end, the sequence arbitrary.

Nomad. Rockheart. Future. Firebowl. Lost. Iron.

The nomads wracked their memories for stories from their homeland that would explain these unknowns. Yet without a storyteller, they only remembered fragments. Without a storyteller, the ground opened up underneath their certainties. Without a storyteller, the unknowns that the omens suckled in their heart bred fears upon fears. There was no fit, no meaning, and no story to explain the disconcerting presence of these writings.

The wars continued to rage. As the nomads sought to help a strange, alabaster-skinned man even more foreign to this land than they, a new set of portents was uncovered. This natural warrior, termed "savage" by the humans that imprisoned him and slaughtered his kin, was decorated by tribal tattoos. As they rested after the battle to bring him forth from the clutches of evil men, it was noticed that those tattoos formed a set of patterns. Patterns that were sinuous and decorative to all eyes but that of a Mongol. To the nomads, they were patterns with words.

Three discoveries, three unknowable puzzles. Yet the tattoos gave a glimmer of hope, for the words they formed were familiar names. Names of Han towns. No more than names, no clue as to where to look, but a small anchor in their ocean of uncertainties. Perhaps then, the solution would be found somewhere in these towns. Perhaps the story would have an ending - or as they suspected in their hearts, a new beginning.

© 2001 Pól-MichelSeachra AnDaingean