Voices of Legend: Ode to Logathara

Prologue: Part One

It was hot. A sweltering hot. The kind of hot that made one's own salty sweat sting the skin. The kind of hot that made the sweat cascade down your face blinding as it invaded the open eye.

It was an unusual heat. The kind of heat that you feared would blister the skin, cracking the surface leaving raw nerve that could tolerate not even the slightest graze of the lightest silk.

The sun was high in the sky, but the land seemed so close to it that they almost appeared to kiss. The heat radiating from the ground rippled across the surface of the land, hazy and disorienting. 

No breeze could touch this land but even still the sand rolled like crashing waves during a high tide as it was swept up by the pulses of the radiating sun.

This was a land of mountains, but not of rock and not of trees. This was a land of giant overarching sand dunes that reached hundreds of feet toward the sun. These ever-changing sand mountains shaped and reshaped as the sand shifted beneath the power of the sun. But a man was there.

A light brown shirt with large dark masses of sweat clung to his back. His trousers were torn, fraying, and worn at the knees. His hands and his feet were bare, and a white cloth wrapped across his forehead and around his mouth protecting his face from the elements. 

As he gripped with his hands and dug his toes into the falling sand, he propelled upward and forward. However, his body would drag down as he settled to take a breath. King Galdon's muscles felt heavy with fatigue and ached with every heave up the unforgiving sand.

Galdon grunted as he slid down once again. While holding a handful of loose sand, he swung his other arm ahead to find a better grip. Few have succeeded in climbing these mountainous sands. Though many have attempted. 

Some called it the birth-right quest as it was said that only those with an ancient blood connection to Alsongod as well as the right to the powers of gods Logath, could climb these dunes without certainty of death. 

These rights were called the birth-rit. Though some could obtain powers of Colonderé, a learned manipulation of source energy, or Dolé, a crude connection to Colonderé, the sands would not obey their call to allow for ascension to the land of the High Priestess.

With his muscles growing weak and numb, and the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet blistering from the toils of the climb, Galdon's call to the sand through his birth-rit was feeble. He felt that at any moment his connection to source would sever, and the call would not be heard. He would tumble down to the bottom of the mountain, dehydrated and unable to move; buried under the waves of moving sand. 

But he kept climbing and he kept calling. He needed above all else to reach the High Priestess. He needed to know what she Saw.

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