Do not ask my name. I have none. Some call me the lonely one, the wanderer.
These are meaningless. All my people are such. They have no names, no
faces, no homes, except what they choose to take on themselves. That is why
many of them join us, I believe, but their pasts are as clouded as their
presents. Only that they might have had them, once, somewhere, do I know.
I do not even have that. They tell me I was born to this life, this world,
a Ranger, a child of Rangers. They say, when they speak of my past at all,
that I am one of them, heart, blood, soul. I do not believe them.
I am like no one else among the people. Too small despite years of work,
too pale after hours in the sun. once, they tell me, my hair shone like the
sun. No more. In the rare instant I see myself, a wavering image on my
sword blade, I can see it is dull, like a creamy river rock long ago
plucked from its place in the stream bed. It does not look like it could
ever have shone. It is as dull and featureless as everything about me,
about my people.
The only thing that shines is my sword. It is the only thing about me,
about my life, that is real. It is all that they remember me by, those
people in the world beyond my own. Though I rarely see them, and they see
me less, they have only to see my sword once to speak of it forever. They
say it must be a blade forged in the fires of the sun by ancient gods. They
know nothing. It is only an old blade, battle worn and hard, forged by a
skilled man, yet a man like any other, but quenched in the blood of
enemies, in ages long past.
I am the only one not remembered, the only one that has no face to show to
the people outside the vastness of the world. Still they say I am one of
them.
They give me an identity, of sorts, and an age. They give me a father,
though they have never yet granted me a mother. They lie, though. They have
told me as much, though never in words. Their words say I am the child of
Aragorn, and so it was to him I was sent.
He is no more my father than I am his child. He has a name and a past. I
have none, and he does not offer me one. I am not part of him, nor he part
of me. This I know, as he does.
Though I lay no mark on this world, it sets its brands on me. For each one
that will never remember, there is one I can never forget. His mark on me,
his scar, was to give me a name no one would know. To me he gave the name
which those elsewhere gave to him in scorn. To me, he gave the name of
Strider.