As they moved up the mountain, traversing the difficult terrain with relative ease, a nostalgic feeling was taking hold in both riders.

"What is with this sadness I feel?" Asked himself the male rider, as he was a man of few feelings but each one profound and silent. The usual coldness he faced his craft was slowly dissolving with the waning sun. With some suspicion and superstition he said; "The air is dense in essence here."

The woman was lost in her reveries. The man thought loudly.

"Your temple is weak, and your taboo is infested of external influences. The Might will never be more far from you, Ankhara."

The woman looked at him with a gaze filled with disdain. Inside her, flashes and echoes of some great feeling assaulted her. A profound mystery. The Might! She started feeling extatic. But soon the mistep of her horse woke her up to the laughing gaze of her partner. A faint blush colored her cheeks.

Soon they found a flat stretch of mountain where they could go with ease. Then they started inexorably losing themselves in their thoughts, conjured to them by the dense nostalgia the mountain evoked them.

When they arrived at an open turn, they stopped a second and saw from the mountain the plains, where a regiment of soldiers were slowly advancing, carrying with them wooden cages, ropes, tents, provisions and fabrics.

"Is this really necessary?" Muttered the female rider. In her eyes flashed memories of her life in the Hunate of Baatar.

"We need to prosper. More tribes and their people are needed." The male rider refrained, but he himself doubted the veracity of the words they were sold in the Hunate.

As far as they knew, they were the only advanced civilization in the continent, with the travelers and merchants telling tales of distant Kingdoms, countries and people. Certainly, the only thing they had always found were these famelic tribes scattered in the plains, in the tundras, in the steppes, almost all too hungry to talk, and almost all too few to have a decently complex language.

Indeed, the world was vast, and new. So he sighed.

* * *

"Anaan, wake up the children", softly muttered a seemingly old man. The phlegm in his lungs made his words seem weak, drowned in water. As he looked inside his ger, he gazed lovingly at his woman, who waited with both her sons in her lap. The dense smell of incense permeated the air.

 As Anaan and her sons stood up, the man said.

"Anaan, come on. We have to move the winds."

With a soft push, she made her sons go outside the tent while she cleaned her hair, oily from the night's sleep and the kids sweating. The man approached and muttered.

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"The day, the twenty stars, the broken ger..."

He helped his wife get ready, powerfully but gently gripping the ceremonial vials, pouring the water from the skin boot, combing the long, dark and ashen hair, losing himself in the perfume of her entire being, a perfume that talked him of their travels, of the sweetness and acridness that was a woman, and the faint smell of their children, both the lost and the living.

"Let's go."

Outside, the women and the men stood in ceremony. Some of the women sang already, preparing the Names they held in their own intimate manner. The men prepared the terrain; they raised against the upcoming winds the long skins that would beat with the hammering of the tempest, extended the large palm leaves that would gather water from the pouring, and started fires around them. Some men brought jewels to signify the stars, and some threw dried blood and soma to the fires as to make dense smoke.

As their mother went to the circle, woman approached her, laughing. Both Ji and Li looked at her mother there, radiant, as she called the Imai, moving aside the mounting dark clouds that menaced the peace of the mountain.

Then the real chanting started. The calling of the Names.

"The Heavens are without a Name." Said, suddenly, Ji. "Come on, let's dance too."

Soon, they both were dancing along the other children; the little ladies pridefully followed the primal gathering of the Name, the first approaches to the Mysteries their tribe so easily aprehended. Li imagined most of them dreamed themselves as moving the gigantic clouds, extending their essence as it resonated with the secrets of the mountain. He saw how Ji danced funnily, like a little monkey, laughing. He sometimes imitated the men, and sometimes the women.

The mounting clouds, still far away, gigantic in the sky, stopped approaching, and started disintegrating in rainbows with natural movements, as if it was the predetermined way of the world, smoothly as if the chanting and the dancing hadn't anything to do with it, but one moment, Li thought he saw the invisible currents of the Mysteries working.

Slyly, Li extended his hands, and remembering the feeling of his mother calling the Name, he too called the name:

"Imai, Wind of the South, move the disintegrating clouds near, near, to refresh me."

Then something happened, something that made his hair stand on end, and his bowels fill with the awesome sensation of adrenaline.

The rapidly disintegrating clouds started approaching as if carried by a powerful wind, at a speed visible to the naked eye, to the aperture in the mountain they were in.

In the corner of his eye, as he watched the drizzle clouds approach, Ji laughed uproariously, knowing it was finally him. The people of the tribe, instead, seemed not to notice, but one of the woman soon declared:

"Imai! It was Imai!"

Soon, all eyes where on their mother, that looked pensively at her oldest son, with both concern and happiness in her smile. Few seconds in, the drizzle started falling upon them all.

Looking at each other craftily, both Li and Ji escaped to one of their huts. There, both laughed uproariously.

"Soon! Soon!" Both rubbed their hands together, as flies. Then started playing, then reviewed their plans, and slept a little. Then, both of them climbed the mountain and sat atop.

If one could be an eagle one could probably see two little kids laughing in atop of a nameless mountain, with the winds swirling playfully around them, carrying the clouds.

Below, in some little path in the mountain, an old rider of a pair of riders muttered, surprised

"The mysteries...!"

And the other looked with her eyes open as the winds moved and the drizzle fell.

"This is a tribe of mages!"

And only her fellow rider and the solitude of the mountain saw the obsessed glitter in her eyes. And only the critters of the mountain heard the march they preceded. The march of change.