Disciples of the Watcher Spirit

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

I know it’s hard to imagine.

Even for you older folk who divined maps of the ancient woods, it was common a hazard and common a death to cross paths with the Thorncrested Wyvern, whose earthen, cruelly-spiked tails bided softly beneath bushes of roses and liverwort, eager to pierce the flesh of the town’s local herbalist or the occasional unwise adventurer.

For you mothers and fathers, perhaps that unwise adventurer–those daft, precious fools–was your bull-headed son or your eldest daughter. If they were not, and you proved successful in smothering dreams of land-wandering in the crib, not one of you went a winter without paying the blood tribute. Slitting the unripened bellies of young stock on frostime’s last moonless night. Pouring blood into the town’s cobbled drinking well. Praying along with your fellow townsmen that the Ivory Hollowsnatch would be sated as it drank its fill throughout the shadow hours, drank and drank until it burst. Sighing in relief as a now-crimson silhouette, glutted on blood and vanity, disappeared in the fine, fragile line of a dawn you weren’t sure you would see.

And for you young ones, dreams of adventuring and dragonslaying start as early as a simply-painted wooden figure on your birthday, harmless baubles no more dangerous or frightening than mere moss lizards. Even as I speak, you may picture these staggering beasts in wonder, knowing them only as honeyed tales of adventure, great scaley avatars of power and magic. Their borrowed names traveling gypsies and caravans would use to beguile and amaze. Or perhaps, poor child, if such wonder is dead for you, I imagine that its death was accompanied by the ashen graves of beloved faces and a figure whose very shadow swallowed an entire town.

I am undoubtedly, unbelievably, impossibly old. Older than the stone-folk who first humbled the Valley’s proud blades of silvergrass into today’s well-trodden paths. Older than the first King Greffendor who declared the proud existence of our unyielding nation. Older than some of the pebbled streams and gentle creeks you grew up with. It seems a farce to imagine that I, who would become the Watcher Spirit of our hallowed soil, could ever recall a time when I was a boy.

However, no amount of centuries that have passed can make me forget the untroubled joys I had once delighted in, the silliest tears I once shed, the warmth of my mother’s hand.

Most importantly, I remember the freedom.

A time without blood tributes in town wells and thorny wyverns in ancient woods.

A time in which children could run with abandon through the fields, indulge in the exhilaration of land-wandering, and grow old having caressed the very edges of the world itself with their own fingertips.

A time where if a shadow cast itself upon the land and coasted along seas of grass, the most that people need ever worry about was an unforeseen rain cloud.

As the Watcher Spirit of this land, I take pride in having maintained a livable peace for our peoples.

However, I have an unrepentable regret that for the sake of such transient peace, I have made it so that freedom will never have the chance to be anything more than a fading memory rusting in the mind of this incorrigible, old, sentimental man.

My children of the Valley, I am dying.

And I do not want the last memory of freedom itself to die with me.

I issue this, a final prophecy, and the last gift this old spirit can give for the sake of his beloved children.

To the Snowy Peaks, I will bestow the cunning of the All-Seer.

To the Stardust Cliffs, I will encase the sorcery of the Ancients.

To the Blackened Lakes, I will sink the might of the Primordials.

To the Clouded Tombs, I will obscure the heart of Greffendor.

Let my death and these final blessings arm the worthy to seize the memory I once knew and a reality we had never dreamed of.

Be well, my children. Be well.