I, Eternity
First Era Echo: The Beginning
Sometimes he could crawl off when they weren't looking.
That happened a little, but just often enough for him to keep his grasp of his sanity, to avoid the realm of the slaver's Madgod one more day, week, month, whatever it took. He had little sense of passing time. He knew that soon he would be sent to the breeding grounds for his first week to keep the slave populations high enough for the whims of their masters. Then he would be back to the fields with the cattle that were treated better than his kind.
He knew that his race was of the Mannish sort. "Need" or somesuch sounding thing in the tongue they kept in secret. He had learned that and the words of his masters after they had taken her from him. It had been like his own parents. They had met in secret, and found her with child before the slaveharvests. They had slain her just after he was born, given to a slave who could produce milk, but his father had found him, told him in secret his parentage, the same as all the others there, but his own and no one else's, and not even the foul sorceries of their masters could take it from him. Then they ground his skull to powder under a carriage-wheel.
She was all he had then. Her secret name, different hidden from the Ayleids name for her of "that kitchen wench," was Caelia. His was Leon. The elves cared not, he was one of thousands of field slaves, too low even for an Ayleid name. Simply "Buro," as so many thousands more were called. "Slave."
And then they had taken her as well, sold her to the Knight Hektor who broke his wrist as he refused to let her go, but spared him a sword-death as a maggot beneath his notice. He had healed well, but his heart was black with hate.
The story was, again, the same as many here, but his own. His own. That no one could wrest from him. Just like his hatred. And he nursed them both with the red blood of his human veins flowing through his blackened soul.
And this day he had slunk off to look at the distant land. Between two of the massive jungle-trees that were on a higher elevation than the rest. He used the vine as he had used the ones from his only magic. He climbed above the dwellings of the elf peasants, far higher than the slave huts.
On one side, he saw the white mountains. Like great fingers of bone jutting from the land after the greens and darker colors of the jungle below. And on another, the Tower. He didn't know what it was, but he knew it must be of the slavers. Men did not build, they worked, he reasoned, to let the elves build. So therefore a building of any kind must be something of the Ayleid. Certainly one so grand, and one of their white stones. But somehow, with the sun shining upon it from behind him, it seemed to glow with the red radiance of twilight. It just made him angry.
He turned back to Sard and climbed down the tree. As he walked back in the fading light, he passed the small river that served as the only source of drinking water and sewer drainage for that quarter of Sard's fields. Looking in the water was a young woman. He remembered her name, dimly. Perrif, it was. She was another field-slave, raven-haired and stony-eyed, as though they were the coldest emeralds on the earth set in her skull. Her story was like Leon's. But it is not. Leon thought as he left her to her thoughts. Those eyes stared intently into the river, and then after Leon had left, to the heavens.
They were not allowed to keep their own gods unless in secret, as with their names and tongue. But even without the knowledge, she knew to address Kyne through a Handmaiden and not directly, as unbefitting a mere mortal.
But Leon knew nothing of it until later.
Later, when the few who served as Elders, who Leon had been told were the wise-men in the Time-before-Time, when the men were something they had no word for, were called to council by none other than the girl Perrif. The young woman who was no different than he, save the time between his birth and the slaveharvest after it as well as the secret names of those they had taken from her.
The Elders looked sternly and with open contempt and amusement. Several seemed to wonder, as they were naked save the small loincloths on two of them, if they would have their pleasure of her after. But she was not interested in love or sex, for her heart, it would seem, had been deadened to them.
"I have spoken with the Handmaiden of Kyne." She said, with power unseen from her small frame, even more emaciated then his own. "She has given me a sign of that which we one were. I call this thing we had Freedom, which is Shezzar-Who-Goes-Missing."
Leon's eyes widened as he understood.
"It is time. She has told me. She has given me the sign. It is time to find Him again."
Leon's eyes widened further than he thought possible as his hate came to his hands. She was speaking of the impossible. But he liked it.
"It is likely that all of us will die, but then we will we be in Sovngarde, which is what She told me Shezzar's domain is called. We shall be Free, in this world of the other."
At first the Elders laughed. And some of the others, but not much. Then they saw she was serious, as Leon had known, and he himself stepped forward.
"It can't get any worse than this." He said. "You dare to laugh at Perrif because she realizes what we always should have known, if we were not weak and stupid? That Shezzar-Who-Goes-Missing is not gone, but here!" He pointed to his own heart. "That it does not need to be that all love is stripped from our hearts until we are merely mannish-shaped cattle? It is time to wake Him up. Let us shake the slavers to the bone or die!"
Several slaves eyes widened as his had when he saw as she saw. He was, again, first to turn.
"I will follow you in this, Perrif, even unto my own death, no, unto Sovngarde where we shall watch those others who followed you fight until our peoples are free, or until all the Mannish races are dead and gone!"
Perrif almost smiled. As did he. But the word began to spread as a loose plan began to form. By dawn, the brave and the foolhardy would begin the fight. They two among them. After that, they would fight to the death until they saw the end had come, whatever it was.
They did not yet see the future that was yet flying from his Mother's home, the Spirit of the Wind, that would gore their foes alongside them.
But the next day would see the coming of Morihaus and the beginning of the age of Men.