The Otori Prophecy

LIII - A Dead End

It took us a couple of weeks to travel from the field we had ended up in, to the cliff-side town, wracked with salt-laced wind. It was a quaint little town. Gulls flew overhead, many of the townspeople were carrying back fishing nets full of fish. For a moment I remembered shards of memories, blurs of a life once lived in a village far away. I had wondered how they had gotten down to the sea to fish but then I remembered the carved out stairs in Jinx's Hollow.

We asked around stalls, passersby, using Madek's actual name but none had heard of him or his family. They each in turn pointed towards the dirt path running alongside the cliff, claiming that a few miles east of the town there lived a hermit, he could provide answers. One even claimed he had lived longer than the town had been here. I was sceptical at first but then a memory of the last hermit we had seen came to mind. Janus, the man who was blind but somehow saw, stuck drawing maps in another nook of Terare.

Ludens did one more round of asking before Mathias and I left for the hermit. He came back saying that all the townspeople had said the same thing when asked of Madek's legend. No one knew it. It was hard to believe when storytellers so often travelled to far out places, spreading tales of legends and myths. So we bid him farewell, leaving Ludens in the care of the townspeople, in an attempt to not force his condition to deteriorate even further.

"Are we sure about this?" I asked. I had carried a frown with me since leaving town, trying to put all the clues we had together so far. I was quite certain now that that man in the tavern was not Teddy and that he gave us a false lead.

"What's the harm? We'd only have to ask him about it, then we'll leave for the next town. Hopefully someone there might know. Remember, we still have the lead that I have and I'm pretty sure that someone in the next two cities should know about Madek or Madek's descendant," Mathias's words rumbled on, serving to try and soothe my worries but I couldn't help but feel that something was amiss.

The suns rose and had started to fall once we saw the hermit's house, farther than the townspeople had said. I wondered if they were afraid of this man. I also wondered what sort of man this was to have lived longer than a town had roots. The hermit's house was tall and skinny, closer to the cliffside than I liked, one wrong step and you could plummet into the northern sea.

We picked our path carefully, at one point being able to look down at the waves crashing against the sheer face of the cliffs. "Hello?" Mathias called, rapping on the door with his knuckles. No answer. He wiped away some dust that was layered on the window, peering inside, it was dark. Inside it looked like it hadn't been lived in for a long time. "Hello?" I called out, stepping around the side of the building. Perhaps the townspeople had overestimated this hermit. "Maybe he died," I remarked, rejoining Mathias at the front of the house. "Who died?" questioned a voice. Frail and old in sound. We both jumped, looking towards the front door that was now cracked open. An eye peered out at us from the gap, surprisingly sharp in its gaze. "We were looking for..." Mathias started to speak, the door slammed shut.

Mathias scoffed. "Not interested in any sale gimmicks or religious affairs," the old voice spoke again. I knocked on the door. There was silence from inside. I knocked again, harder, tired and annoyed. I had come all this way looking for Madek and gods forbid that this would be just another dead end.

Resting my head against the door, I heard shuffling inside. That coot... He was there, he just didn't want to see us, assuming that we were trying to sell him something or get him to join The Church. I could only imagine how he handled the acolytes turning up at his doorstep, the words he might've said to them.

"Please sir, we're looking for someone, the townspeople said you could help us," I pleaded. This was what I had learned from Mum back in Nantgarth, people were more likely to give you information or let you help if you sounded polite. Despite my manners, I could hear the tiredness in my own voice. "Take it up with the knights in the capital, I am not someone to come whining to about missing people," he hissed.