Selcouth, God of Wanderers

An Abridged History of Thask

I no longer remember the faces of the two little men I met last night, but I do remember they told me they'd passed a man of Eduard's description a day ago and which way he was travelling. For lack of a better lead, I start off in that direction.

The morning is beautifully sunny.

The going's good.

The hills roll before me like waves upon a grassy green sea, the illusion broken only slightly by the occasional copse [of trees (for the sake of clarity and in my admitted ignorance of whether a copse may be of anything else,)] fence and domesticated, non-rabid animal.

I pass pastures and fields, sheepdogs and distant herds. I hear mooing and barking and bleating and farm labour.

From one field I steal a few vegetables, and an hour later in an orchard illicitly pick a few apples, wondering if actions like these affect my alignment. They must—mustn't they? I am thieving. (The word fills me with excitement; not, I hope, because I yearn to be a thief but because in some small way I'm transgressing, rebelling, like any good teenager should.) Or is it only if I'm caught that my alignment is affected? No, there must exist some sort of omniscient being devoted to the task, an Alignment God who sees all and fiddles with values accordingly. I hope He doesn't mind me taking those apples too much. Probably, he doesn't mind one way or another. He's not the God of Right & Wrong. Taking a bite of one of the stolen apples, I decide that any potential hit against my alignment is worth it. I'm hungry and the apples taste delicious.

Then the grasses begin to turn yellow and brown, the dirt becomes harder, drier. There appear holes in the fences surrounding the pastures, and the fields through which I pass are increasingly empty, cropless. I witness: gaunt livestock, sometimes a broken tool or two. No people. The sheepdogs eye me with a famished disinterest. There are still copses, but their leafless trees stand jagged-limbed against a dulled sky whose sunshine is colder and milder than before. I feel as though I have crossed not only several miles but a season: from summer to autumn, and not a nice colourful autumn, but an autumn already fearing the gloom of a long and hungry winter.

In the distance, I see silhouetted against the sky a gargantuan structure that I cannot identify.

It crosses my mind I may have entered an afflicted place—by drought, disease or who knows what other misfortune—but if this is where Eduard has gone, through it, I, too, must go, and, bravely, I press on.

Randy is unusually silent. (I expected him to make a nasty comment about my self-professed bravery.) If I didn't still feel him trembling on my finger I would have thought I'd lost him, which I guess would be a victory—seeing as he's my enemy and aims to make me insane—but also kind of sad—because he's the closest thing I have to a companion on this quest. That elven ring (or was it the bread that was elven? Or was the bread leavened? My memory of that entire evening feels like fog.) must have been very bad for its mere sight to have shaken Randy this deeply. I do hope he's OK. He was polite to me yesterday; he even said please. And he wanted to meet that other ring so much. Maybe Randy's not such a bad item at all. Maybe his sarcasm is a mask, his confidence an act, his desire to drive me insane an acceptably-malicious excuse to be around me, to get to know me. Maybe he really is lonely. After all, I have no idea how long he went without a wearer before I put him on. Metals endure for centuries. Wouldn't it just be the saddest story in the world if all Randy truly wanted, ever since he was forged, was to have a friend? Or perhaps he did have one, a best friend (let's call her Gertrude) and she was sold to an uncaring stepmother, never to be seen by Randy again. Of course, this is all speculation (would likely have been my next thought if I didn't—at that very moment—have a sack thrown over my head and a blow delivered to my temples which deprived me most fully of my naturally sharp alertness.