The Tale of Venator

The ugly lump of a man before him slumped with great age, the few strands of hair left on his gleaming scalp seemed too tired to even lift in the light breeze. His skin had pulled itself tight over his body, excluding the grinning wrinkles on his face. This body and this soul had seen more than many ever would, and it dawned upon Venator that he would never likely see so many years unfold before his eyes. To die old was to die a coward.

The elderly man paused and then briefly grinned when Venator's gaze refused to depart from his own.

"Oh, I see...well," murmured the shopkeeper, his eyes retracted with thought, "we'll be going there in a few months, our route is taking us around the entire empire, to every major port and city. The province fighting the Barbins is called Barada, do you know of it?"

Venator nodded. "It's almost five hundred miles away, taking the shortest route, of course."

"Well we don't intend to do that. It'll take the caravan the better part of a year to get there, are you sure you want to go with us, you could probably find a faster way-"

"You've been the first visitors we've had in four months," he interrupted.

The shopkeeper's glazed eyes waited with thought, Venator stood patiently, the buyers continued to shout and push. One of them threw a rock at the fat man, who caught the projectile and calmly hurled it back at the customer, who ducked and then scowled at him.

"Alright...alright, I'll take you along," the man conceded, "You'll have to earn your keep here, though, understand?"

Venator grinned with a satisfaction he hadn't felt in a long time. "Yes...yes absolutely. I'll be back in a few hours. Don't go anywhere."

He departed with the crescent moon at his back from lovely Ivlüv that night, without mentioning his departure to his relatives or to his friends, the pendant's glimmer waning after the sun set. He had merely collected his clothes, a satchel to carry them, and his father's axe-nothing more. It wasn't long before his mother realized that something was amiss, and she searched the town and the countryside for her son, for many days, and found nothing. Two of her men had been lost.

Venator spent the year exploring the vast cities of Trachos, their towering skyscrapers and beautiful monuments to scholars and warriors alike never ceased to amaze him. He never knew that such things could be built by humanity, he was in a state of sheer amazement as statues dozens of stories tall peered at him through the murky chasm of time, their stone hands wrapped firmly 'round thick books or rifles or swords, some with playful grins on their faces, as if to mock the various absurdities of their lives, others with scowls or screaming lips stretching the folds of their stone skin. While rubbing the metal of the pendant one cold winter evening Venator remembered that his father had told him once a story of the Titans (of which these statues reminded him) when he was very young.

They had been giants since birth and roamed the earth long before man or beast ever did, their footsteps could shake the snow from mountaintops. Their hands worked the land, they churned lakes from mudflats, spread carpets of deserts over floors of rock, puffed clouds from their pipes, and the sweat from their labor beaded down upon their creations and forced verdant life to emerge from inky lifelessness.