I have paced these forests for so long I don＇t know if I am man or I am beast.
I, though, hold deep within me a quest for revenge.
Then I must be a man as much as I can be.
I have learned to speak the tongue of the animal
I have learned to read the signs in bark and snow.
I have taken within myself the spirits of my fathers,
long time gone.
In this short time, far from home, a man of Iron I＇ve grown.
A man of Iron I have grown.
A part of the Eternal Woods...
Late evening...
＂Just after sunset on his way back to his camp after watching the sun unite
with the mountains in the west, he sees the flickering of light between the
tree trunks. Approaching, he sees an old man sitting calmly by a fire, as
if waiting for him. His left eye missing. His beard as if gold. The signs
on his cloak and hood familiar. The one eyed old man matches the
description of the soothsayer, as told by the elders of his village by the
fires at night when he only a child. The boy, now a young man, eager to
know, asks the one eyed old man about his dreams. Dreams he cannot
understand. Dreams about strange things he is seeing himself doing. Then
the winds that seem to talk to him. Voices that whisper to him behind his
back. The one eyed old man tells him of the cycles of the stars, of the
trail of fate and of the valley where time and space had ceased to exist...
where his world ends and the shadows begin. The one eyed old man tells the
young man that fate has chosen him to interfere with the other world. The
disturbance is already made. The daughters of the four winds have sold
themselves to the shadows, distorting the balance of the universe. And the
one eyed old man says he has seen him come for a thousand years, and that
the aging gods have told him to teach him all that he has ever known and to
prepare him to ride beyond his world and into the shadows as their champion
to restore the balance. To his aid he shall be given a sword forged when
this world was young. He shall be guarded and guided by two ravens, and he
shall ride the eight-legged stallion of his fathers＇ god. He will encounter
the Woodwoman, and he will make a visit to the Lake. One hundred days and
one hundred nights his training shall be hard. And this very night it will
already have begun.
And thus he had met the One Eyed old Man...＂
