The Legender

Prologue

With his carving knife, the craftsman etched the story of a war onto a bone, the rib bone of a great beast that curved up from the floor and reached the ceiling of the craftsman’s shop. The story began at the top of the rib and concluded at the bottom where the craftsman worked. He etched the setting and characters in fine detail, forming the expressions on faces no bigger than his fingernails. Nothing was overlooked, not the slashes on the wounded or the jagged edges of broken spears.

All about the shop sat countless other carvings, dusty carvings made from animal bones, each telling a different story of battle. They were the only company the craftsman had, and the etched characters watched him work with unblinking eyes and silent faces. He worked so intensely on his craft that he hardly noticed the passing of days and nights from the dark insides of his shop; it was as if he himself were in the battle he was etching. It seemed that nothing could break him from his work, neither sleep nor want of food. But then he heard a knock on his door.

Chapter 1: The Bone Carver

It was the strange hour between morning and night when all colors were grayed and no one walked about the city. No one except for a young flower girl, a child of no more than twelve years. She hid in the shadow of an empty street, clutching to her last bouquet and shivering in the cool early air. The dress draped over her frail frame kept in little warmth. It had been a nice piece of clothing at one point in time, but there were dirty smudges in the embroidery and all the edges were tattered and frayed. The leaves and twigs tangled in the flower girl’s hair showed that she had slept in the city’s orchards the night before. She looked up and saw that hints of daylight painted the monoliths high above, the monoliths that stood on the top of the enormous tower in the center of the city. She did not have much time.

She knew this and scouted out the marketplace square to be certain she was alone. It was a still and quiet place except for the shushing of the fountain and the distant bark of a jagg as it hunted for rodents in the gardens. Besides the occasional osarrow flying to and fro from the nests set in the façades of the library and temple, no other living creature stirred. Even so, the flower girl did not feel entirely alone as she ventured into the marketplace square. The city teemed with life in its architecture; gargoyles peered down from the rooftops and there were dramatically posed figures of warriors and lovers molded into the stonework of doorways and window ledges. The traveling merchant wagons, obscured by shadows, appeared to huddle around the square’s fountain like a herd of sleeping beasts at a watering hole. The flower girl crept across to the other side of the marketplace as if trying not to wake them. The closer she came to her destination, the tighter she held onto her flowers.

Opalias, flowers that grew on the tops of Mount Serdacia just to the southwest, spread their petals out like a silver, seven-pointed star with white lining the edges. The front doors of every shop and home had a bouquet of opalias hanging from them, all except for one. Wedged deep into the darkest corner of the marketplace, a tiny shop made of mossy stones and clay shingles appeared outcast from the rest of the buildings. A harguar skull, the remains of a giant predator, jutted out above the doorway with a few of its vertebra attached to the wall as if to give the building a head. Within its sharp fangs it held a sign that read: Arkos’ Artifacts ~ Bone Carvings and Relics of a Wilder Age.

None of the city residents ever went inside. Occasionally travelers from other parts of the world visited the shop, some coming from the desert far away in the south, others from the mountains that surrounded the civilized world, but no one knew of the business that took place behind the shop’s doors. The flower girl had heard that the shopkeeper talked to rocks and to the air as though they could understand him, and she had even heard stories that he stole away children and used their bones to make his carvings. But on that morning she did not let herself grow fearful of such stories. The other girls had sold all their flowers, and Darish the trader had promised to give her a whipping if she did not come back with money before breakfast. She had scoured the city for doors without bouquets, but she could only find one. Morning approached swiftly, and so she crept towards the bone carver’s shop.