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.The necromancy couldn't be clarified.Forces Varthlokkur thought of as the Fates and Norns would be squabbling amongst themselves.Yet he elected to live, to pursue this love-destiny.The Fates, he felt, had commanded him.Somehow, somewhere (perhaps from the Tervola or Princes Thaumaturge of the Dread Empire), he had acquired an unshakable conviction that the Fates controlled his destiny.A collateral portion of his divination troubled him deeply.Mourning llkazar, he had sworn never again to use the Power for destruction.The divination said that he would, during the coming age of confusion.That saddened him.Varthlokkur stared into his fire, lost in contemplation.He had gained command of all sorceries while in Shinsan.Spells had been put upon him.At what cost? He couldn't remember.His selective amnesia disturbed and frightened him.) He had become ageless, though not immortal.He would die someday, when the Fates willed, but he need never age.He could reverse his aging when he wanted, to the lower limit of the age he had been when the spells were cast.He let himself grow old.The old were revered and well treated.Alone as few men had ever been alone, he cherished even such inconsequential kindnesses as he garnered this way.He found the proverbs: "No man is an island," and "Man lives not by bread alone," uncomfortably true.Alone.So alone.Could he not find just one friend?For a time he played shaman to a nomad tribe on the steppe.It was a comedown, but a position for which he was grateful.He couldn't renounce the Power completely.Because he needed to be needed, he deluded himself with the belief that the tribesmen loved him.He still didn't understand human nature.The tribe went to war.Its chieftains became righteously indignant when he refused to use the Power on their behalf.Nor did he employ more than the minimum necessary to insure his survival when they turned upon him.He wandered again, through the basin of the Roe, amongst the oldest cities of Man.He saw nothing to elevate his opinion of his own species.He wished the time-river would roll faster.She waited somewhere downstream.There was an old road running east from Iwa Skolovda, one that seemed to lead nowhere.Periodically, the Kings of Iwa Skolovda sent colonists along it into East Heatherland and Shara, where they were supposed to supplant the savages through stubbornness and numbers, winning new territories for the Crown.Such movements were invariably devoured by the barbarians.The road was wide and well-paved near the city, but after a dozen leagues, once it no longer served to bring produce from the countryside, it soon degenerated into a path.One spring day, two hundred years after the fall of Ilkazar, Varthlokkur followed that road, a sad old man who hadn't yet found a thing to make living worthwhile.But recently he'd encountered an interesting legend.It concerned a remote castle of unknown origins, and an immortal of equally nebulous background.Both waited at the end of this road, in that knot of tremendous mountains called the Dragon's Teeth.Both, Varthlokkur had divined, could become an inextricable part of his fate.He had found a scrap of the legend in one city, a fragment of myth in another, and a piece of speculation in a third.Together, they had hinted of a castle called Fangdred, or the Castle of Wind, as old as The Place of A Thousand Iron Statues, and as feared, and as mysterious as that alleged stronghold of the Star Rider.In Fangdred dwelt an immortal known only as the Old Man of the Mountain, who supposedly had retreated there to escape the jealousy of shorter-lived men.Maybe, Varthlokkur thought, he and this immortal were two of a kind.Maybe Fangdred could provide what he so desperately needed: a home and a friend.Varthlokkur feared he was slowly going mad.In the midst of a raging, barbaric world where each man interacted with hundreds of others, living, loving, laughing, weeping, dying, and giving birth, he alone was outside, an observer totally alienated from human involvement.He didn't want to be outside, didn't want to be alone-yet he didn't know how to pass through the doorway of human intercourse.When he helped, he was cursed.When he didn't help, he was hated.Yet there was no way he could abandon the Power that damned him.And Ilkazar had made him fear human relationships.A romanticized relationship with a mother whose face he couldn't remember had set his feet plodding a narrow, hard, joyless road cruel to the life-paths it had intersected.Relationships never worked the way they did in his dreams; dreams where love dwelt, and peace, without pain, became something real, while harsh, double-edged reality gradually became ghostly.The sole dam holding the madness at bay was the woman waiting downtime.He followed that road for weeks, across East Heatherland, into foothills, then up and down the flanks of tremendous, brooding mountains.His path tended ever upward.Each mountain rose taller than the last.Soon he was higher than he had believed possible.The trail hung a half mile above the tops of the trees.Eagles planed below him.But the road continued upward over gray stone and snowy mountains, a barely discernable trail carved from living rock, following ridgetops, sometimes passing through tunnels, climbing, climbing.Finally, in a place so high he could hardly breathe, Varthlokkur paused.The road had taken a sharp turn around a knifelike corner of cliff, and ended.Weary, cold, he wondered if he had come a thousand miles for nothing.Then, barely discernable through the ice and snow, he noticed steps cut into the flank of the mountain.Tracing their rise, he spied a tower with crenellated battlements peeping over a looming scarp above.With a groan, resigned, determined, he began that last thousand feet of travel.The stairs ended on a narrow ledge fronting the fortress.The tower, that he had seen from below, perched on the very peak of the mountain, and, like a lighthouse, reached high into the wind.It had no visible doors or windows.The bulk of the stronghold rambled down to this ledge, which overlooked a thousand-foot precipice.So this was Fangdred, and Mount El Kabar.Briefly, before hammering on the sagging gate, Varthlokkur looked out across the Dragon's Teeth.It was obvious how they had come by their name.Each peak was a giant gray-and-white fang ripping at the underbelly of the sky
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