The Mosque Hill Fortune (The Sons of Masguard, Book One)

Prologue

One Story Ends

"Fate is a callous thing. An infinite, cyclic machine that moves and ever moves until all is swallowed or forgotten. We try to measure it, try to understand it, only to fail in fantastic fashion. Then we explain away our incompetence by pretending it is all part of some great mystery.

What a lark.

Give it long enough, and it will show you the truth. That our relationship with life in all its wonder is a one-sided love affair, where we press our faces to a clock and imagine it as a form of intimacy. That it is the minute hand, the hour and the second, stretching in every direction beneath our breath, crumbling mountains and turning tides. And we are spectators, wondering at our own reflections and nothing beyond. What fools we must seem, standing with our noses to the glass while the hands revolve around us, over and over.

Stubborn.

Oblivious.

Champions of willful ignorance, forever missing the point.

Are we truly so helpless to alter the course of time? I'd never thought to consider it. But as I sit here writing what is likely to be my final correspondence, I'm forced to wonder whether things might have been different if only I'd traded the mystery for clarity of vision while I still had the chance. If only I'd bothered myself to step away from the glass for even one, blighted moment.

We found it, my friend. We found it and it is NOT what it seems. It's bigger, and the truth of it terrifies me in ways I am willing to admit to none but you. The things I have learned... the things I have seen... They would baffle and amaze the greatest of our scholars. They would put my every discovery to shame.

They would paint fools of us all.

Truth be told, none of that matters anymore. I didn't see this for what it was until it was too late. There is only one way out for me now. Since I've neither a fox's intuition, nor an Ancient's soul, I can only guess at the ramifications of what I am about to do. And I know that wishing alters nothing.

Perhaps my course has already been set.

Perhaps the clock itself is untouchable, regardless of where I stand.

But if I cannot change it for myself, I must at least try to change it for you, my friend. For Secora, may her Banners ever wave. And, most of all, for my son.

My little Marshall.

Will he ever forgive me for this?

It is my dearest hope that I will one day be able to ask him in person.

But should Fate will differently, please tell him..."

Tell him...

Masguard's quill froze above the parchment. Tell him what? Garrulous and clever though he may have been, here at the end, the otter captain found he had nothing to say. Nothing that would matter. The boy on the other side of the world didn't want another speech regarding duty or the fate of the Secoran kingdom. He wanted his father.

And that was the one thing Masguard couldn't give him.

What a failure was he?

He had discovered more lands than any explorer before him, met every mythical creature in the book and many besides. He had brought kingdoms to their knees and lords to his service. He had pulled the most dreadful artifacts the world had ever seen from the very brink of Oblivion itself. And for what? To disappear into the annals of history as someone who might have mattered? What was the point of his success if it prevented him from offering even that small measure of solace to the only family he had left?