"Ask yourself then: what is time? What is love? What brings out or cows evil? What cows time, or love, for that matter? Are these merely stories you bring down to this darkened place? Are they stories, or are they riddles?"

"What?" the dying, drowning boy asked.

He asked this of the laughing demon, as it removed its mask.

"Before Nankyoku" The robed, half-human thing spoke. One side of its face was light crimson and the other was cornflower blue. A single horn grew from between the divided colors on its forehead. It had the long thin mustache and beard that the mystics of this oriental world often grew. "Before your time, that is." It finished saying something with no meaning to the boy. He was dreaming, drowning.

"I don't understand." He said in response to the demon's concerned gaze.

"You are tainted. You smell, you stink of love. You have a strong and unconditional love for...that girl I see. Her image is in your eyes. Would it help you to die in my water, without polluting it? Would it help if I told you she is the lover of someone else and doesn't even know you exist?"

"I'd still love her. I'd be happy for her. I'd wait for her, possibly in vain." He spoke back to the demonic creature.

"You are no good to me. I must decline your offer. Go back to the surface of the water, unswallow the brine. You are not welcome in my realm. Your flesh isn't even fit for my sharks. Undie, you wretched and rotten thing." The demon sounded angry. The dream, the drowning, it was fading.

The Portuguese had left him on a single floating piece of a shipwreck.

When you spread evil it comes back in unusually atavistic ways. This one was a discovery. What worlds can be contained within other worlds?

He floated helplessly on the single floating piece of wood from a Portuguese ship. He kept holding on. He was only a boy but he had been in love. A kind of love adults forget how to feel, the kind that humans may draw upon for unlimited reserves of endurance, regardless of the physics of exhaustion.

His eyes fluttered open. Two of the local fishermen were standing over him. They had rescued him from the circling sharks that had not been given permission to eat this one, not yet. Sharks obey their own gods.

Back to the fishermen: one of them said to the other - what he really said the boy couldn't really understand very well but it sounded like it went something like: "Watashitachiha kono gaikoku hito no shōnen to nani o subekidesu ka?"

Although that is only how he recalled it. The exact words might as well have been jibberish for how closely they have been quoted from memory.

To which there was no decision. Instead the other man looked at the boy and recognized that he lived only because he was on a quest to return home to the girl he loved. That stare...there was only one thing that it meant. It transcended all cultures, languages and times. True humans know it at a glance.

Again he barely caught half of what was said but it went a lot like:

"Kare wa koi ni ochite irunode, kare wa ikite ite, oborete imasen." The other fisherman thought this was hilarious and laughed on impulse but obviously felt it was merely a sentiment, hardly a fact.

The boy knew they were discussing not only his fate but the meaning of his survival. Although his memory at retelling this moment made it hard for him to repeat words he didn't know the meaning of with any kind of grammatical accuracy. It was close enough. He knew enough to comprehend they were both on his side. He spat some seawater and asked for water.

They discussed his request and determined that some sake would suffice and gave him some of the wine they were drinking instead of fishing, that day.

"-benzóico." The sentimental fisherman that could tell the boy drew his strength from Love's holy quest. He asked again, still crudely butchering the concept of language on that boat that day: "-benzóico."

"Watashi wa Porutogaru-go o hanasanai" The boy revealed he knew their tongue, after all. Interesting. "Watashi wa anata no kotoba no ikutsu ka o shitte imasu."

It took both fishermen a minute or two repeating his poor dialogue to each other to figure out what he had just tried to say.

"He knows how to speak. We should just talk to him plainly." The drunk fisherman said.

"He came from our waters. It is just the sea talking. We need to dry him out if we want to find out what happened." The wise fisherman replied. They looked at him. The sake had revived him and he had sat up, listening to them.

"I am not Portuguese. I am German." He told them in their own language.

"German. It is the same thing." The drunk fisherman had rosy cheeks that the boy liked. He smiled, despite the insult.

"I want to get home. My...friend...I miss her." He said without guile. Disappointed sharks missed him. Who missed who and why hardly mattered on that boat.

"We both have wives. We understand." The wise fisherman got it. "But there is no way to get you home. Sorry."

"I am glad I am alive, but not if I must live without her."

"Such is life, young man. You can learn to fish and stay with us. Be bright, it will win you the friends you need. I promise you this." The wise fisherman smiled as he would smile to his own son. The gaze of this boy was a reflection of noble purity that was so very rare.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

And so he stayed.

Fished.

A year passed.

Another.

Another year after that.

He grew to manhood and his enslavement ended when the local lord gave him a home. This came to pass one day, a strange day.

Lord Kansha was riding one day upon a steep embankment. The other edge was a cliff known as the Widow's Wake. The white man that he had allowed to live in the fishing village on the northern end of his property was the one who risked his life and rescued the lord when his horse plummeted and a fig tree stopped the man from dying with his beast on the rocks below. "You saved my life." Lord Kansha told the young man.

"My lord I only did my duty, please forgive me for touching you and knowing you fell." The white man showed grace.

"Of course. In fact, I want you to come and live with me. Come and live as the one who cares for my horses, no, what am I saying? I am old and my retired wife gave me no son. Come and be my son." Lord Kansha lifted the man's chin and saw surprise. "You do not believe this is your fate now? How can I believe I did not die, just now?"

"My lord, I struggle to exist here in this strange land. How can I know what my place is if I am your son?"

"You cannot. That is the beauty of it. All of the other lords will be jealous that my son is brave and humble. Theirs are not. I will be the envy of the land."

"A land I have wished to leave since I came here."

"I see. Come and let all know who you are. Then you can go, when I have shown you off first. Then you must go, I suppose, for I see something distant still calls to you. I can see it in your eyes."

"My eyes, lord?"

"Your eyes are the eyes of my son. A father always knows what his son desires." And so it went. He lived there for more years. Those years were ones when honors and luxury were heaped upon him. Every distraction was offered. He learned to write kanji, he met the nobility that Lord Kansha answered to and they accepted him. All that knew anything, could see that there was some kind of unknown-royalty in this man.

One day the Emperor requested his presence in Miyanoshita. War threatened to explode across the countryside. Times were changing and the presence of a white man inheriting Lord Kansha's property could create a scandal. It was inexplicable that he was told not to show any kind of formality to the Emperor. He did anyway, it was instinctive.

"Stop that. I need to talk to you man-to-man." The Emperor spoke after the man had done some crawling and such.

"My lord I do not presume that I can speak in such a way to your divine grace." This weird creature spoke the true language as a second tongue. Like the Portuguese did.

"Nobody is with us. You are the son of Lord Kansha. I order you to stand and face me, speak to me with the boldness that your father knows to use when I call for his council here." He stood and with effort he remembered how to raise his eyes and met the steady gaze of the Emperor. "Now that wasn't so difficult, now was it?"

"I suppose it was not." He agreed.

"You may not stay in this country. You must go. But you are the son of my beloved Lord Kansha. I love him as he loves you, and as you love someone far away from here."

"My lord?"

"It is true. You are strong beyond all reason because of it. Think not that I cannot tell. I am a god, after all."

And so the boy found himself in command of not one, but three ships.

They sailed forth, handpicked sailors, many of them Portuguese that had been released by royal decree to take home the son of Lord Kansha.

But they never made it home.

It was the frozen shores where another story begins, that they found.

"Nankyoku" They called it.

No true story could be so strange and remain untold, except here it is:

The ice claimed their ships one by one until all three had become trapped.

Ashore meant leaving the ice for the rocks and snow. One of his men fell and they hurried to his side. The shivering and the fear had claimed his life and his spirit flew back towards Nippon to answer divination about the failed voyage.

A great tragedy always proceeds a great adventure. This was no tragedy, destiny had designed each moment on purpose. This was no adventure, fate had other plans.

Mountains that towered mightily, even above the height of divine Qogir Feng, stood like stern primordial gods. The mountains were awake and whispering, mocking the handful of the representatives of mankind that stared up from the shore below the mountains. They had called this particular man to them, caring not for his insignificant motives or even the temporal power and command of those who had sent him. These mountains had never before been seen by human eyes, and they had chosen now to reveal themselves. They needed to be observed; it is part of existing.

The mountains were evil, noble and ancient. They had watched every great race come and go. In mockery of such alien-races that had accidentally created humans, warred among the stars and worshiped themselves, the old and grumpy mountains now brought forth mankind. They brought mankind to them, to see them, to know them, to become a part of the annals of all great races, most of them with more disgusting origins than humans.

The mountains laughed in giddy humor, having played a cosmic joke upon the various antique species that called themselves the masters-of-eons, by including man as one of the witnesses of Creation. Witnesses to the embodiment of wisdom, weird-old-gods, elder thoughts, ancient words blown onto the earth by even greater beings. They could have simply been a range of impossibly massive mountains, except that is not what they really were. They could only be comprehended by human minds, as just mountains.

The men were on their knees, screaming and cackling. The energy broke the hardened criminals, Portuguese 'pirates' and the volunteers that had enough courage to sail with Kansha's son. The oddysey had ended here, in howls of instant, mind-shattering madness at the sight of such an unearthly vista.

Only one stood examining what was before him with...

...with eyes of curiosity.

The others were in twisting throes of hysterical tantrums. Their eyes were wild and full of unwanted wisdom. Their minds were whirlpools of words that held arcane meaning. Their screams were a song of praise and they ravened sounds that human throats had no practice. Some screams of theirs did burst lungs and as they popped one by one, blood sprayed from their mouths to the snow. Others had smashed their own jaws on rocks or tore out their own eyes, digging with their fingers to prize free the orbs from the sockets. Somehow one of the men had lit himself on fire and stood, arms outstretched and laughing merrily as his skin peeled and crisped. The nightmare orgy was of men confronted with the face of God and finding hatred and spite.

And yet one stood calm and silent among them as the rest thrashed.

One stood there just observing, comprehending no less, but unbroken.

Stood unbroken, unashamed.

But his soul withered and sickened, never-the-less.

He couldn't even hear the tormented voices of his broken crew. His own thoughts spiraled into this unhallowed place, older than most stars. He knew it had drawn him here, somehow. His feelings were torn from him like a garment and so was any kind of innocence that remained. He knew then what no human should ever know.

The laughter of the mountains that towered into the heavens was a wind of death. The blast of freezing air instantly iced and killed the men. All of the shrieking and chortling crewmen who clawed their own faces, pulled out their hair and writhed on the snow. Their minds had already been destroyed at the malevolent sight.

All except the one they spared. He would have to be flung away, to remember.

To walk among other men, ranting and raving. As he would roam and rave: their truths would spill forth, one by one. Secrets that the mountains had never agreed to keep conspiracy for. The mountains loved little mankind, these silly bipeds, so young a race and with lifespans like mayflies. Men were goofy, funny little creatures that offended every fallen great race. It was the offensiveness of mankind that the mountains love the most about them.

How else could they express the madness of the ages?