The Tale of Venator

I

An infinitely bright sun scaled a sky and cast an agony of light upon a barren and hopeless wasteland, of numerous jaws of serrated rocks snarling from a blackened earth. Ravines and canyons rented a tortured landscape, where veins of lava had snaked and roared. Demons and monsters of ferocity loped about its expanse, their widened jaws uttering praises and songs to a flapping beast in the sky, and the rider with a great horn atop it that would shriek with the rise of the sun. Two years before this desert of despair came into being it had been a land of beauty and comfort, a place of shimmering trees and voluminous clouds, of singing children and running streams, of gentle breezes and soft, sleepy journeys from warm day into cozy night. Simple stone huts would dot the top of a hill that nestled itself between flat expanses of golden farmland and verdigris fields of tall grass. Only a single dirt road led away from the hill called by its inhabitants Ivlüvcatan (some gave it the shorter name of Ivlüv), only a single feeble cord of dirt to an outside world, where wars and politics and greed and lust raged like the grumbling stomachs of storm clouds. To outsiders it was a petty retreat from revolution and empire.

Before it was reduced to the ruined expanse of today a baby was born in Ivlüvcatan to two happy parents, the father a thick bearded warrior who had settled from his fighting and the mother the cause of his doing so. They named the baby Venator, a strange but not altogether uncommon name for a child, and then continued to live out their lives in lovely Ivlüv, the father hiding a secret urge to return to the battlefield before his increasing age locked him away with the surrounding serfs. His father feared such a life, one devoid of adventure and rife with boredom, leaving him to look at most peasants with contempt in his graying eyes. Venator's earliest recollection of his father was of his upside-down cross-shaped pendant clinging to his chest and glimmering against the light of the sun. His father had moved it one day, to show his young son a small tan mark that he said had been there ever since he had taken the pendant from the corpse of an old man.

His father would often sit atop a great boulder some distance from the town, quietly fingering the pendant, his mind dwelling on memories of battle and war, memories he longed to return to. One day his eyes caught a great pair of flapping wings just over the horizon, and he felt his stomach lurch with fear. A horn trumpeted, rattling the rock and the earth around it. He knew it came from that thing, and fled in earnest, the pendant stinging at his neck.

The next day, several seasons after the birth of Venator, a horseman from Dardan galloped into the center of the town and eagerly requested that all citizens able to fight join in their lengthening war with the Barbins to the south. Venator's father stood from the crowd and shouted that he would join and help their cause, and the messenger soon recognized him, for his father was a great celebrity. Without saying goodbye to the wife he loved or the son he cherished, his father rode away, his fingers eagerly clutching his faithful battleaxe, their edges white over the ornate scripture upon the hilt.