The Wanderer's Tale: Rusted Memory

Part One--Illavia

The masters of this world all say that every great story is composed of the same three elements: a beginning, a middle and an ending.

Of course they are, in fact, correct, but most stories are so much more than those simplest of elements.

Stories are people. The lives and moments in need of remembering. These tales are time and essence, blood and tears, life and death and so much more.

My own story has a beginning. The middle stretches on forever and there is no end in sight.

Call me memory catcher, storyteller, skald, bard. The Great Wanderer. Most who've heard me tell my tales simply call me Morovio.

Because none who've had the pleasure to hear me sing my memories of this world ever forget that name.

Morovio.

In their minds they know it cannot possibly be the same man who told stories to their grandfathers, and the grandfathers of those grandfathers long before they were a spark of thought in the mind of the gods who made us all.

Morovio.

Joyous on their lips when they raise their cups to me in celebration.

Morovio.

It is the first thing they remember when they wake the morning after a particularly drunken endeavor during which I dazzled and bewitched with one of my tales, the details of my face fading from memory. Lingering on their lips, the curse that is my name. Morovio... Would that I could change it. The All-Creator knows I've tried, while casting my prayers to the wind and begging Him to help me, but it seems the cursed hold no favor with the gods, not even the great father of them all.

It was so long ago that name first became my own. Another lifetime so distant even I can barely remember it. I was a simple farm boy then, the ninth and hungriest son of my father. I don't remember what my father called me anymore, only that my life truly began when he apprenticed me, his youngest son, to a traveling bard after a night of drink and song at the local tavern. I barely remember my mother's tears, the trembling of her lips and the keening of her agony as the old man wrenched me from her clutches.

His name was Morovio too, but that's a story for another time.

On the subject of my own naming, it took place far longer ago than it should have, another life, nay, another age, as I've written in these pages oh so many times.

I've watched dynasties fall, empires rise from the ashes of despair as races merge or wink entirely out of existence to be remembered only in my tales. I've watched people I loved wilt and wither like flowers against the cruel hush of time and felt the longing of my own innumerable losses so often that sometimes I am convinced those losses are all that remain of the man I once was.

I was a man, once, and I suppose in some small part I still am. The remnants of that man lie buried deep within me; he stares back at me through bloodshot, weary eyes each time I catch my own reflection in the glass. Eyes that remind me of my mother, though these days they are rarely filled with tears, as hers so often were when I knew her. That woman, my mother, so long gone from this world that I am all that remains of her memory. My hair does not dull in its sheen, it does not lose its color with age. In fact, it is still the same dark shade of chestnut; it still curls and waves as it grows to length. And though the lips beneath my nose remain the same, they are more likened to a sneer than a smile because those eyes of mine, so like my mothers, have seen too many things that can never be unseen.

And tonight the grief of the things I have seen is far too much for the soul of a single man to bear. The memories prompted me to drink, as they all too often do, and this young woman who lays sprawled before me looks so much like a dream I once had I am overwhelmed with drunken grief.