Our Little Gods 2: GOLDRAC, Of the Old Gods.

Chapter 1.

Fenelon 

 We have been looking up at the stars for so long, probably because some of us thought the gods had gone there and would come back from there; others who did not believe in gods thought that the stars in our sky were the home of many cultures of men-folk and domns kind and that one day, maybe, some would find a way to sail the vastness between out worlds and theirs and they will come to us.  But all that was religious mishmash or child's tales to him. He was here, now and his problems were of this world and none others. Or so he thought.

 He had always had difficulties looking at the stars anyway, for one, the crisscrossing of Uithil was particularly visible to him at night and its light almost occulted the flickering one of the stars. Seconds, this world was already hard enough as it was for him. Being the only son of a men-folk woman and a domn merchant from the closed Quertig lands had marked him from the onset.

 Yes, he was the child of the passionate love between his father and his mother. 

 No, he had not been expected.

 Yes, his father upon going back to the Bogatzkoï had provided him and his mother with and estate and enough liquidity to see them through almost anything life could throw at them. 

But he had always been the odd one. Even in a city like Sàmàs, hybrid and cosmopolitan where men-folk and domn kind had been mixing for centuries, he was the odd one. 

The Quertigs of the closed realm of Bogatzkoï were a rare tribe of Domn, they never allowed anyone inside their lands and the sole merchants leaving the peninsula would come to the great markets of the world only to trade, they would sleep in their own safe houses with others of their tribe and let none enter. The wildest legends use to circulate on the Quertigs and not all of them kind. Some even pretended that their isolation was punishment for destroying the thirteenth tribe. Others claimed that they actually hid so because they committed the most shameful acts between each other.

 Fenelon tried to ignore the rumors and the odd looks, the gestures warding off evil when his mother and himself walked the streets of the market and the alleys of the city. 

As an infant, his link to the magical network, Uithil, became undeniable when his mother found him sleeping in the air above his crib time and time again. She called the local Magus to have him tested. The man left telling her that her son could be what the magaï of Sardi in Humala, called a 'natural'. As the boy grew up the more power he demonstrated, in the fair season he would play in the walled courtyard of the mansion floating in the air as high as a man's head, making his toys float around himself, at times he would bring his mother herself into the air. She would open her arms and he would float into her embrace and, as she kissed him time and time again, they would float down to the ground where he would race around, shouting merrily.

 The Magus came often to visit. He was an old man with a flowing white beard and eyes clear and pale as mountain lakes. The boy Fenelon remembered him talking quietly to his mother, his deep warm voice going on and on late in the evening. What he did not know, nor cared about at the time was what they were talking about. The magus was making the case so that his mother would allow him to be taken to the Halls of Sardis, far away in the forest at the feet of the great mountain chain of Goldrac. He needed to be trained as his powers developed, the magus reasoned. The boy could become dangerous to himself and to others, for there were no limits to the powers of naturals. It broke his mother's heart to let him go, but she knew that she could not be the one to teach him how to control something she did not understand. And so, he left on the long journey down to the realm of Ukko where the Halls of Sardis with its floating towers rested at the heart of the city of Humala.