The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Episodes 1-3 of 7)

THE WITNESS - ONDROMEAD

STEAM ROSE through the smoky, dense air, carrying the scent of beef and broth and onion and garlic and potatoes and carrots. Ondromead's mouth watered as his spoon dipped into the bowl of meaty soup. He and Hashel sat side by side at a table in the far corner of a tavern, lanterns around the room coating the patrons in an oily yellow haze as they talked quietly and ate and nodded their heads to the music of a fiddle player seated by the empty fire hearth. The fiddle player's arms swayed with the bow, fingers wavering along the strings to the sad tune he played.

Hashel grinned as he stuffed spoon after spoon of thick, hot soup into his mouth. The boy did not speak, but he could eat a seemingly endless amount of food. Ondromead chewed a stringy piece of meat and stared at the boy. He had tried writing in the book to ask the boy his name, but the child did not read. When he first called him Hashel, the boy looked surprised, but responded. A good enough appellation until the boy spoke to correct him.

The morning sunlight had found them sleeping on the docks of a fishing village along the northern coast of the Iron Realm. The day's events unfolded as one might expect at first, the Nevaeo villagers setting their boats into the water and heading out to gather the day's catch. Hashel had watched the fishing boats with great interest. The boy quickly learned over the preceding weeks that their arrival presaged some event of importance, and he keenly observed the faithfulness with which Ondromead recorded the happenings in the black book. He had been even more fascinated with the book's endless supply of blank pages than the purse at Ondromead's waist that always held enough coins to pay for their needs.

After the first week, Ondromead took to opening the book each night in an attempt to teach the boy how to read and write. He wrote the events of the day in the language of the land they occurred in, and there were many languages to choose from. He had no idea how he could speak and write every language of Onaia, nor did he understand why he felt compelled to record each day's events in the black book. With so many options, Ondromead chose the language he suspected the boy might speak. As they had met in the south of Atheton, he only selected passages in the Easad tongue to read to the boy. Sitting in an inn on the north coast of the Nevaeo Dominion provided a chance to recite the day's events in the language shared by the two dominions, thus making it easier for the boy to understand them in written form.

Ondromead pulled the book from the bag sitting beside him on the wooden bench and placed it on the table. Hashel wiped the inner depths of his bowl with a piece of stale bread and stuffed the soggy mess into his mouth, licking his lips as he tried to chew the oversized bite.

Ondromead opened the book to the page recording the event they had witnessed earlier that day. His finger found the exact spot with ease. He could always open the book to any passage from any date whenever he wished. It did not matter if he opened the book at the front or the back, the words he wished to see would be on the page before him. He turned the open pages so Hashel could follow his finger beneath the hand written text as he read aloud.

"Year 3512. Month 9. Summer. Kullhah. Nevaeo fishing town. The fishermen pushed their boats out into the water shortly after dawn, rowing far out from shore. The fishermen here work in teams of three or four boats, each with two men aboard. The boats have a single mast and sail with one set of oars. One man minds the tiller and the sail while the other rows. Once in position, the lead boat passed slowly by the other craft in the team, the men pulling at one edge of a large net until it spread out between the vessels. They lowered the net by means of stone weights, waiting nearly half an hour before pulling it to the surface, piles of large fish flopping in panic.

"The fishermen then hauled the catch into the boats and rowed to shore, piling the fish in rows along the moss-speckled docks before returning to repeat the process several more times. The women took the fish and gutted and smoked them in huts along the beach. In the afternoon, a young man of twenty or so years fell from one of the boats, getting tangled in the net. The other men tried to save him, but his struggles only ensnared him more deeply in the woven strands, trapping him and a school of fish. The fishermen eventually pulled the man into a boat, but he had drowned. His mother wailed for hours at the dockside, clinging to his body, the man's younger brother standing behind her, weeping."