A Boy's Journey

Prologue

"You'll find me where the grass doesn't grow, the birds cease singing, and time is all there is."

        Four months had passed since the boy had received that message. Four months since the ancient scroll had been dropped in front of his small tent. And all those four months had been spent traveling, searching for something. The something that the riddle was talking about. The problem, however, was that he didn't know what he was looking for or even where to look or why he was looking. He had simply been compelled to continue moving around the continent, from place to place.

        The boy had considered simply burning the scroll, simply abandoning the quest or whatever it was this riddle was talking about. But there was something that kept him from carrying it out each time: curiosity. If he did burn the scroll, the riddle - though it would remain in his mind - would disappear and no longer exist along with the scroll. He didn't know how he knew that he just knew.

        Ever since he had picked up the piece of rolled up, yellowing parchment, bits of seemingly random information had been popping into his head. Things like: Asia has some really nice fruit markets and food vendors, and Madagascar is host to amazing wildlife you can't find anywhere else on the plant. The boy wasn't sure if these tidbits were connected with his receiving of the ancient scroll. If they were connected, however, then he assumed they were hints as to where he should try looking for. Almost five months had passed and he still had absolutely no idea as to what he was looking for. He had spent hours and hours sitting in his tiny tent trying to decode the riddle or solve the puzzle. Heck, he didn't even know if it was a puzzle he had to solve, or a riddle he had to figure out the answer to, or some quest he had to complete.

        He had kind of just assumed that it was a quest and hadn't really given the matter much thought. Honestly, he didn't even know why he was pursuing this idea. For all he knew, which was much, the scroll could just be a riddle that somebody had written down and dropped in front of his tent flap. But the more the boy thought about this possibility - of the scroll just being some strange prank - the more he got the feeling that it was the exact opposite of that. It was something about the way the paper was wrinkled and yellow as if it had been rolled and unrolled over and over through the passage of time.

        The boy had been wandering the country pretty much his whole life with no real aim or purpose. His goal each day was simply to make it to see the sun go down behind some hill in the distance. One day, as he watched the ball of fire slowly sink into the sea, thoughts of his past came flooding at him like the waves crashing on the shore he was sitting on. He never really knew his parents, as they had both died in a car crash that he had miraculously survived. He was sent to live in an orphanage that only had five other kids living there. All his life, he had lived at the orphanage. It wasn't bad, for the children were taught the fundamentals like adding and subtracting and reading and writing. They were fed and cleaned and taken good care of. But for the boy, it was too dull, the same routine over and over each day grew tiresome and he longed for a more exciting life where he wouldn't know what the next day would hold for him. So, at the young age of 10, he escaped from the orphanage. He was smart for his age and clever, and escaping hadn't been very hard. One of the janitors always took a nap right after lunch in one of the staff lounges that was pretty much always empty. The lounge wasn't far from the boy's classroom and he had stolen the key to the gates to the orphanage.

        After that, the boy had lived on the road. He had worked a little to pay for the small tent he now had and some other essentials, but other than that, he had no other belongings. Every time he got to a new town or city, which was pretty much every day, he worked odd jobs he picked up to make some pocket money for food and water or whatever else he happened to need. He had gotten used to his simple life and was almost starting to get bored of it, that is until the old scroll turned up in front of his tent.