Chapter 1

And then our God was gone, leaving us to ponder our own existence and what that now meant. After several seconds, it seemed all eyes turned to me with hope and fear naked in their expressions.

Feeling their gazes on me even through the mental fog I seemed to have wandered into since the magic and my own grief combined into something terrifying, I blinked through the fog as I realized every eye was on me. Me, a simple monk just barely out of my acolyte training, and they being some of the wisest and most powerful people in the Human race. "What?" I remember snapping defensively.

A black haired young man with a thin mustache and pointed beard stepped forward. "The God called you 'son.'"

I gazed back among the others and saw two other young men who looked as if they could be the dark featured one's brothers. As I gazed around, I saw a few more who looked as if they had come here with siblings, but not many. Many looked as if they had scrounged what they could carry and simply walked away from their towns and villages, friends and kin.

"We are all the sons and daughters of the Lord," I replied, almost automatically as my training had taught me, after taking a long look at them all.

One of the dark man's brothers pushed forward as well. I remember thinking he was the father at first, but the vigor in his movements and the spark in his eyes belied the white hair. "Each of us was called by the God. Told to leave the destruction and await Him here. But none of us was called 'son' by the God. Who are you to be so named?"

I was about to tell them my name but hesitated, letting the breath I had taken slowly leave my body. Mine was an old name, one passed down through my mother's clan for generations beyond reckoning. But it was also a long and horrible name, one which I always had loathed due to the teasing it brought my way. In the old tongues it had meant "wandering one," though why my mother had chosen that as my name had always escaped me. Now they were all gone, or soon would be, and I was left to wander the world forever ... alone. Perhaps my mother, blessedly dead before the last of her clan's wars, had belonged here with this company, instead of me. Perhaps she knew what fate her son would be cursed/blessed with. Perhaps she possessed more wisdom than I remember my grandparents telling me she showed.

"You may call me the Wandering One," I told the rapt audience, gazing over their heads at the mountains without really seeing them. "As for why the Flame Lord called me son, I know not. I only know what He told me on my journey here."

They waited for a long minute, hanging on every word, hoping for further enlightenment. I did not feel wise enough to grant them enlightenment. When it was apparent I would not, a young woman prompted me with, "What did the God say?"

I recall smiling sadly and shaking my head, seeing my now white beard waving in the rising wind. "Only that we were brought here because we were blessed with the intelligence, wisdom, foresight, or intuition to see where our race was going and to absent ourselves from them," I replied, my tone plainly bitter, fighting off the feeling that we were but ghosts of a race too stupid and brutal to know not to fight to the point of extinction. I tried to make my eyes focus on the young woman. She was beautiful in a commonplace sort of way. Long brown hair, brown eyes, tan skin, and the scent of animals came to me from her. Even as I looked at her, a wolf cub trotted up behind her and rubbed his side against her woolen leggings before sitting obediently beside her. The smile I gave her was a sad smile, thinking that she was the type of girl I had hoped to wed, before I heard the calling of the Flame Lord. "As I see the doom laid upon those of us who were 'blessed' enough to see the future so plainly, I begin to wonder if my mother and her clan were not the ones to be blessed."

"What do you mean?" demanded a slightly older woman who came to stand beside the tan girl, hugging her shoulders as the younger woman shrank from me with fear. Obviously a sister, the older woman was stunning, where her sister was simply pretty. "What are you talking about?"

I shook my head wearily and sighed. "My mother died not longer after I was born and her clan was destroyed in its last war with our neighbors shortly after I was sent to the monastery. I merely wonder whether she was the one blessed, not to have to see what we have become and then to live beyond that," was my sorrowful reply. I was beginning to feel sorry for myself and that would not do. I had to get away from these people and find solitude. A quiet place to meditate upon what my Lord placed upon us as the last of his spoiled children. Those good enough to be granted a reprieve from the doom the Gods decreed to Humans. I remember sighing again, a sigh not unlike the God had given, and hitched my pack more comfortably onto my shoulder and nodded to them. "May you all have enlightening journeys and may we not be burdened with meeting like this again anytime soon."

"Wait, what are we to do?" the beautiful young woman asked, holding tighter to her younger sister.

I paused, almost irritated at her need for my instruction. The God was quite plain in his words. "Whatever you will," I replied curtly over my shoulder without looking back, "so long as it be done with regards to the God's proscriptions. Perhaps if you wander long enough, you shall find your answers."

I could feel my fellow Immortals standing there watching my back as I climbed out of the dell, leaving them in even more shock and dismay than when I so suddenly arrived. As soon as I crested the dell I felt a powerful compulsion rip through me and I felt the gathered Immortals at my back be hit with the same compulsion. The desire to leave this quiet, God-touched place and go out into the world. Each gathered up their belongings and began walking away from the others. Only the few siblings stuck together as they all left the place of their fate's falling. We none of us truly knew how much time passed between that first Holy Gathering and when we would all find ourselves compelled to seek each other out at the death of the first of them. But each remembered the last words of the Wanderer as if I had inscribed them upon their skulls. Many would decry my unfeeling abandonment of them at our beginning. Our first coming together after that was an emotional one and I had much to do to repair my relationship with them. They saw me as the Elder, the leader of the Immortals, despite my being among the youngest of them. I merely saw myself as a tired, angry, confused, grief-stricken child cast adrift by my only parent in the world and cursed with a punishment I did not feel was deserved.

I walked away from that dell and kept walking for nearly a week before I realized I was not really tired, I had neither hungered nor thirsted, I had no urgent need to relieve myself, and I was neither cold nor hot, despite the warm days and the cool nights. I simply walked without stopping for a week, my mind drifting in a fog of anesthetic daze. When these things began registering, I emerged from my thoughts of "Why me?" and saw I had walked deeper into the mountains. My body following the least resistant path, I found myself in a deep valley, the roaring sound of a river echoing off of the walls formed of towering mountains whose caps of snow were much further down than I remember them being as I saw them on my approach ... days before, when the world I knew fell apart and my God set me adrift.

Even as that thought occurred to me, I could not really summon any anger toward either my God or my now extinct people. I felt cast upon a vast empty ocean, alone, as one curst by the Sea Lords themselves; bound to roam alone for eternity for some unimaginable crime against the Lord of Fire.

Gazing around at the gorge, I saw a sun-bleached log not far from the rushing rapids frothing over the rocks hidden beneath the surface of the river. Not really weary, I nonetheless sat down and pulled my pack off my shoulder. I knew I had some meager rations within, stale bread, smoked rabbit from my journey to the dell, and a few winter apples scavenged before I left Humanity behind. I felt the need to eat something to reaffirm my Humanity, to deny the logic of the last week's flight from my fellow Immortals made without rations or rest. And while the provisions were stuffs I would have turned my nose up at when at the monastery, I wolfed them down as if I had not eaten in a week. The taste was magnified, not by hunger but by time and the chasm between me and my Humanity. It was a meal I would remember for a long while as the best I had eaten. It would not be until civilization arose again that I would eat so scrumptiously.

When the last bite of tart apple was gone, I crawled over to the edge of the river and washed my face before drinking deeply. Sniffing, I was surprised at the lack of rankness wafting from my body but nonetheless felt the need to bathe, if only to purify myself and fortify my spirit for the journey ahead. Reclaiming my pack, I shouldered my burden and followed the river, looking for a pool shallow enough and calm enough for my purposes.

I walked many miles downstream before I found what I sought, nearly two days of walking beside the roaring river. The river fell down several step falls until it roared into a broad bend that lazily brought the deepened river through the rest of the forested mountains and down to the coastal plain. By that point I would have been shocked to hear myself think, never mind another living creature. It was as I was disrobing to bathe that I heard ... something. Even afterwards, I am still not sure I actually heard something. Perhaps it was not my ears but my mind that made me aware of the presence of some ... one?

Either way, I was not about to strip down to greet whatever was out there. Calling up my power, I muttered a protection and pulled my clothes back on. My eyes quartered the broad river valley, searching, searching, for what I had no idea. My brain merely told me I was not the only living thing here and that it was no mere mountain creature come to gawp at the silly ... not-Human.

"Ease yourself, Wanderer. I mean you no harm if you mean my People no harm," a very feminine, very soothing voice said calmly, her voice whispering through the trees. My eyes tried to find what my ears now said was there but I saw nothing. But now my mind was agreeing with my ears because the presence of this feminine voice began weighing on me. The sheer power I began feeling was astonishing and I began thinking that perhaps the Flame Lord's mate, Daona Danainn, was paying me a visit. She was the only other god besides the Sea Lords and Viniterus I knew of and the female Sea Lords would not be present in these mountains. A silvery bell rang through the forest and it was several bemused moments before I realized She was laughing at me. "I mean no discourtesy by my hilarity; I have just never been mistaken for my Mother."

The woman who emerged from the trees further up the mountain than I was looking was tall, slender, and beautiful in a way I would never have believed myself capable of appreciating before seeing this vision. Her skin was a creamy dark copper. I hesitate to say brown because the word brown just does not do justice to Her. She had black hair that glowed in the sun and cascaded around her stunning face in frothy waves flashing deep blue highlights. The sky blue eyes that pinned me in place were dazzling, keeping me enthralled even as She got closer. Her nose was straight and proud, her chin also proud but nicely rounded, and her cheeks high, giving her face an exquisite heart shape. Covering her arms, torso, pelvic girdle, and legs were what looked like pieces of lacquered armor and a helm was cradled under her left arm. Strapped to her waist was a slim longsword with a cunningly sculpted hilt and crosspiece. Even given her appearance, I still had no idea who She was, nor did I care. If She wanted to call herself the Goddess of the Universe, I would simply nod and genuflect to her radiance.