Ellas - A dozen years ago

Kane

I estimated it to be a fifteen day journey from where Anna now deemed to be our haven, and I found it to be an arduous and very lonely journey.

Anna had ever been my companion, my friend, and I loved her with a vengeance. But now suddenly, I was alone; all of my own making I knew, yet I also knew that I would not turn back, could not turn back. But that knowing did not help against the longing I felt for her.

As I rode, foremost in my mind was time.

My recollection of when I was captured and brought to Ellas was clouded by days, weeks and months of terror, mindless beating and torture.

It had taken me months of thought and calculation to arrive at even this approximation of the time.

And this approximation was a three month period during which I believed I had the best chance of intercepting my capture.

Almost as if in agreement with my estimate, I reached the boundaries of the arid dessert that surrounded Achra on the tenth afternoon.

The rest of the way I would travel on foot, as I could travel light and would be able to survive with little sustenance. But Bright was another matter – I would need a train of pack horses to feed and water such a magnificent beast for an extended stay at Achra.

Long ago I had stopped naming my mounts; the closeness and the bond that such a naming brought always made for hurt that I could do without at the animal’s eventual demise. But this mount was special; a Durin stallion, much as most of the others had been, but there was an intelligence to the creature that overcame my reticence at giving him a name. Bright, a play on his so obvious intelligence, but also for the sparkle that always seemed to fill his eyes.

Bright I left at a homestead almost on the edge of the desert, paying the householder – Joram was his name – with almost enough silver to board Bright for a year or more, and the promise that if I did not return in four months the horse would become his.

Joram was a happy and cheerful man in his mid forties, I guessed. He had a wife, Mae, and two children – a babe in arms and Dantis, a seven year old boy.

They were kind enough to feed me that night I stayed with them, and their hospitality was a great balm to the loneliness that had filled my soul on the journey up to then.

In the morning, with extra provisions forced upon me by Mae, Joram’s wife, I bade them all farewell, but not before spending a while with Bright to ensure him that he would be well looked after in my absence, and that I would return.

Whether he understood or not, I truly do not know, but the gleam behind his eyes, his nods and whinnies that seemed to come at a point where some kind of acknowledgement was required to what I said, left me happy to believe that he did.

That first day’s march seemed endless. I was alone again, not even Bright for company, and the conversation and laughter that I had just left was sorely missed. But trudge on I did.

Throughout the four day march – I had pushed on late into the evening, only pausing for a few hours sleep before setting out again long before sun up – I tried to occupy my mind by seeking signs of the passage of others, and ensuring that I myself left none, and was not thus in danger of being discovered.

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It was an easy game, a boring game, and although I did not let up my vigil, it did little to keep my thoughts away from what I would see at Achra, and reliving those first few days on, what I then thought was, an accursed nightmare of a world.

Long hours I also spent considering the justification I had created for this trek of mine.

The realisation that the time when I would first come to this world was near, had come to me on waking one morning. And with that realisation came an almost unbearable need to be there, at the Stones, when it happened.

It was not curiosity, not the wish to view from afar the events of my past, it was something else. A something that, until I pressed my mind to determining when it was I would arrive and resolved to make the journey to Achra, ate away at me.

I did not know what it was, but it was the driving force for my expedition. But I knew also that part of me wanted to see, wanted to know that it had not all been a dream, and that it had really happened. But driven though I was, those two needs in themselves were not enough to justify travelling to Achra. But finding Dar’cen was.

Anna believed that he had not yet returned; she did not feel his touch upon the world, she said. But we had still devoted most of our time since my awakening to seeking out where it was Dar’cen would hid himself away to slowly rebuilt his strength until such time that he could again assault the world.

We had found nothing, no clues at all.

Anna felt nothing, but if my calculations were correct then he had returned and somehow hid from her.

So I reasoned that perhaps this gnawing need to be at Achra could be something akin to Anna’s premonitions; warning me that he again lived, and telling me that I should once again travel to Achra. And then by being there I could follow the Nargu and their so familiar captive to where the demon had ensconced himself.

I had already, many months earlier travelled, again alone, to the the base of the mountain, to the very spot where my former self spent that last night before awakening before him.

Yet I found nothing, nothing at all. I had thought to find a nearby secret trail, or some means by which we had been transported that night – a travelling circle or… or something. But I found nothing.

Now I believed that, if I followed the Nargu and their captive, I could witness what actually happened, and thus deduce how we might finally find him.

Part of me had wanted to avoid seeing, avoid reliving those first few days, and instead travel directly to the mountains, but the need in me, the need that drove what I did, somehow insisted that I go there to Achra, and witness all that had happened to me.

Anna knew nothing of where I went. Long ago she had insisted that she must know nothing of my past, my life before Al'Kar - she knew nothing at all of my life as David, nor Kanteth, the tool that I had been, the tool that did not yet exist as such.

To learn of such things, she said, could change all that was to come, and so she would hear nothing of my past. And so, long ago, I had given up trying to speak of it. Also, somewhere deep inside, I knew that she would not condone my actions; she would do her best to stop me.

When I reacted Achra, I settled myself on the very same hilltop that I had occupied with Jain and the others so very long ago – why do otherwise when I had already deemed it the best location to observe the goings on at the Stones?

The first night found the stones devoid of any life, devoid of any signs that anyone had been there for a very long time. And though I had expected no less, disappointment filled me and I slept little, instead dwelling on how long I might have to wait, and even fretting over the possibility that I might already be, too, late and had missed what I had travelled so far to observe.

Other thoughts also filled my mind that night, thoughts that would have made Anna weep with despair – thoughts of change, of how I could change the life I had led, of how I could slay the Nargu before they even left this world to travel to mine; of how I would never have been taken, and how I could live in peace with Maggie and Tony.

But with those thoughts came a dread of the unknown, of what might instead fill the void created by the change I made, of what would become of this world and its people that I had loved for so very long, of what would become of Anna.

Those things, those worries, drove such thoughts of interfering from my mind, but not before I had considered the paradox of my situation – could I even make such a change; would whatever forces drove the universe allow me to?

Were I to kill the Nargu, I would not be taken, and I, the Nargu killer, would never exist to become their killer – a paradox indeed.

Or would destiny weave some trick into the pattern, such that the ones I killed would not be those sent to bring me here.

But despite all my thoughts of change, I knew that I would not willingly interfere with what had already happened. I only worried that, when the time came, I would have the strength to resist the urges that I knew would fill me when I saw the torments the Nargu heaped upon my then innocent self.

That was my true worry.