Shadows & Sorcery #178
You know, there’s nary a better dark fantasy plot device than “we found weird tombs in the earth” and that’s exactly why this edition of S&S is so utterly subterranean and…subsepulchral? Subcryptian? There’s scary graves down there, and more, in this edition. Sometimes editions take on themes all by themselves, and NOT because I literally sometimes just forget what I’m writing. That never happens.
Anyway, reminder that next week is the next chapter of The Path of Poison, and if you’re just joining us here at Shadows & Sorcery, first of all, hello! Second of all, go check out the archives. And third of all, now’s a better time than ever to hop on the Path of Poison train as the gang just made it to Farhaven!
By the way, last week was the first part of a short, two-part adventure with the one-armed warrior Kastaine in the Dragonmagick world, make sure to check that out HERE
And of course, please leave a like—let the stories know you enjoyed them!
This week, we follow the one-armed warrior Kastaine as he descends into the Crypt of Ice, we join a reluctant Veney as he searches the Profaned Depths, and we walk alongside a lone knight as she seeks that which dwells in the Dragon’s Deep…
Crypt of Ice
They came at dusk after several nights of total silence, nary a hint of their presence from scouts that the one-armed warrior Kastaine had marshalled with his authority. But he was not a commander, his fighters were few, and would only be bolstered come sunrise by the agents from the northern keep who acted as guardians against intrusions like this. When the attack came, it had been swift and devastating, the defenders had merely managed to wound a few, and only kill one of the draconians. It looked less like a proper attack, and more like they were probing, or teasing. Letting the humans get a taste of what was to come.
The defenders had one advantage, however: the false spy. Kastaine had grilled the clansman from the ice peaks for what he'd been feeding to the draconians, and they'd managed to vacate one area that might have been otherwise razed in the attack. Of course, it meant the enemy now suspected all of the information they'd gained, and the element of surprise couldn't be counted on going forward. But lies were saved, and that counted for something besides the ice-man's honour.
A little after sunrise, the northwards reinforcements came. Again, few in number, but they were battle-hardened, well-trained, well-armed: agents like Kastaine but of a different caste. He was glad to see them proudly bearing their kingsmail arms, breastplates, and helmets. It spoke to their experience, their might, and their valour, and did wonders for the morale of the local fighters. Made them feel like they weren't so alone. What's more was those fighters were equipped with weapons of greyfolk Art—a serious boon to the defense of this smattering of hamlets.
Things were looking better, until they weren't.
That night, the draconians came again, and it was all Kastaine and the guardians could do to hold them off. They were bold, savage, relentless in their assault, until they suddenly fell back. The only thing that went in the defender's favour that night was the fact the draconians seemed to believe that no human would so brazenly lie to them—the false intelligence continued to provide, for now. The draconians had retreated with more of begrudgery than vainglorious ego, as if pulled back against their wills. But the next attack, which might come at any time, might prove fatal. They'd seen what their opponents could muster, but Kastaine and the northern guardians had a feeling they hadn't seen what their enemy really had. Surely a greater force awaited, or was moving even now. These skirmishes were hardly the vanguard of an invasion, or some draconian lord's fancy.
Inside a tent, Kastaine, the clansman from the peaks, named Hérur, and two of the senior guardian warriors sat around a small round desk bearing a vellum map of the surrounding hinterlands. Though they came in on the wing, they came from the same direction, which, according to Hérur, was a particularly barren expanse, difficult to traverse, and untrod by human feet. It didn't, as far as his people knew, lead to any kind of mountain pass or advantageous overlook. They could fly, though, and so might have found some impregnable gorge from which to operate. So that was a problem. They needed to see in there, but none of the local scouts, or even scouts from the guardian keep, felt confident in their ability to make headway of those peaks.
There was one other thing. Only a scrap, Hérur said, that came to him offhand in a mind transmission, for the draconians actually seemed incapable of human speech. Something, the impression came, of a discovery in the mountains, and a sensation of pride, importance, and gloating. But that was all. Only a flash. But enough to make Kastaine wonder. These small, short, but devastating attacks might not have been skirmishes or advance parties after all. They might have been tests. All kinds of things existed in those mountains. Old, lost things. It made him more than wonder.
No attack came that night, and Kastaine used the time to prepare. He had little experience with the ice peaks, but as far as he was concerned, he was responsible. And besides, he had Hérur to help him, and by high noon the next day, the two men found themselves delving deep into the frigid peaks raised by the Great Grey Ones so long ago. There was as much of stone as there was frost that crept as skins across the rugged slate and glassy obsidian, fog that rolled in vast, sea-like banks, and ice that rose and fell in titanic mounts, twisting columns, and rippling fields. In the higher reaches, Kastaine found himself arrested by the endless vistas of the deep, sweeping gulfs of crisp white valleys in which snowdrifts flowed like rivers, and then by beetling summits of ice he was certain must have scraped the sun itself. The sky was alternately streaked and swirling and shimmering with cold and cloud. It stretched far beyond what any eye could see—likely even those of the mightiest dragons of the elder days. The air, however, was freezing in the absolute extreme, painful to breathe, and he found himself, much to his great embarrassment, having to break quite often. Hérur didn't blame him. Even the wildest clans of the ice wastes didn't venture into these heights, where no game of any kind could possibly be found. It wasn't so much the ice itself that was the bulwark against invasions from the underworld, but rather the cold. Most dragonspawn couldn't fly, and draconians couldn't fly half as well or as long as the spawn that could. True dragons found the cold to be pure agony—it was a sapper of strength and heat, and the winds could whip swift enough to strike a man to the ground, and likely give a good-sized dragon a sure thrashing. The storms were worse, throwing bolts of frozen lightning through the air, shattering in razor sharp showers carried by blinding blizzards.
These most remote regions of the wastes, and there were many beyond this, were the oldest parts, the least trodden, if they ever had been. And it was here they followed a few lone flying draconians to an isolated landscape laden with ice-crags in which a higher eminence of black stone sat, imposing its unchallenged dominion over the stretch draconian-infested camp below. Kastaine laid low upon the snow, and watched. Nothing moved down there. In fact, there was a good chance nothing would. They were immersed, each and every one, in a state of torpor in heated pools. Man had no spirits to venerate like the greyfolk, but in this moment he wondered if greyfolk ancestor gods didn't have a hand in this. Kastaine silently motioned for Hérur to follow—the central mound held in its face one great rent, and he guessed whatever it was they had found would be in there.
A chill snaked through the air, which was alive with the dripping of meltwater. It ran in rivulets down the sheer walls and in little streams along the dusty, uneven ground. Braziers lit and filled the length with pale orange illumination and a tolerable cold, unable to truly shake off the deep freeze which had settled here millennia ago. Judging by the general smoothness of the place, Hérur decided this wasn't a new cave—the peaks sometimes experienced shifts in the rock or ice, after which new apertures opened up for exploration and exploitation by nomadic clans. No, this had been here for a long time, though perhaps frozen over and recently excavated. The ice belt, so the oldest chronicles went, was once a land unto itself, a border and threshold too perilous to leave as it was. As such, its depths and heights were riddled with primeval ruins, both of the oldest human make, not long after their initial emancipation from the dragons, and of a kind that typified the heights, and then greatest fall, of ancient draconian civilization. This land was utterly devastated, and the ice belt had become its tomb. Draconians were obsessed with the place, and it made sense this was another grasping for old glory and power.
The greatest thing mankind had ever learned about its hybrid nemesis was that they did not so naturally express the many powers of their progenitors. In a way, they were like human magicians who took and teased forth the powers of dragonblood, only the draconians had their own supply. They had their sorcerers who delved into the secrets bequeathed and handed down to them by their masters of how to unlock and express the might of their heritage. Draconians were a fractious lot, but not so back when they roamed the lands under the ice belt. The greyfolk were always on watch for the rise of a draconian unifier, and it seemed now to Kastaine that might be the plan here. This wasn't just a base of operations for raiders, skirmishers, slavers, or invaders. It was a crypt of ancient draconian dead. Hérur seemed almost cowed with fear of the withered, leathery things in their deep recesses. Out of every single one, and there were some several dozen, long, opaque tubes of some fiber, or perhaps gut, stained with black streaks in the inside, ran to and collected within a central effigy that was, as the agent peered in, a tomb with a draconian corpse half-immersed in thick, black blood.
Kastaine was, in truth, probably far more frightened than his comrade, but he had no time for it. That tomb must be destroyed.
His kingsmail arm flashed to life, and with a shout, the agent of Castlegrand thrust the spectral fist into the dark broth and tore forth the ancient corpse, squelching and casting forth strands and tendrils of dragonish blood—only for a great shape on black wings to thunder forth from the shadows, spitting fire and curses. Kastaine caught the blast on his kingsmail arm, but the draconian sorcerer grabbed with him wicked talons and cast him to the earth. It hung from the high ceiling, blunt snout peeled back to reveal dripping fangs and sparks of flame. Its clawed, spidery hands worked as it began some spell. Kastaine leapt to his feet and unhooked his axe. The thing was searching about—and the corpses in their recesses were beginning to stir. An unkillable army of draconian dead? Spells of resurrection? Even more dreadful secrets prised from the minds of their ancestors? He didn't even want to think about the implications of that just yet. And by the sun and stars he hoped he wouldn't ever have to.
It shrunk back, ready to spring forth at him again. Kastaine braced and brought back his axe to meet it. But curse it all, even this spindly specimen packed a punch. Its wings flared, and it sprung from the ceiling, only this time, something else met it—from just behind it, Hérur, having swiftly ducked into a shadowed corner, and having clambered with nimble ease up the rising tomb recesses, leapt, grappled, and thrust a huntsman's dagger into the draconian sorcerer's neck. They tumbled to the ground in a cloud of broiling smoke as the thing tried breathing its flames. The corpses rattled in their graves, the hold on them enfeebled, and Kastaine wasted not even a moment to laugh. He bounded forth and drove the Art-forged fist of kingsmail into its jaw, and planted his axe in its skull. A gurgled hiss escaped it, and nothing more. A single long, slick black, and clawed arm lay still just outside of the central tomb. But neither he nor Hérur paid it any heed—best not to—as they dumped several brazier's worth of burning coals upon it.
The draconians outside still slumbered in their hot springs, the fools. Come nightfall they'd awaken to failure and ruin, and flee back to their towers in the underworld, while Kastaine warmed himself by a fire and the village could sleep peacefully.
Profaned Depths
Bad memories crept out of the black soil of his mind whenever Veney looked at Bray Lane. The borough in which that particular nexus of filth lay had long been used by the city to contain its worst elements, and had been, years before Veney found himself promoted to the bespoke station of Inquisitor, his beat as a guardsman. It sat back against the mountain, and an old tenement at the very end of the long, irregular street had in fact been turned into the secret entrance to a vampirist's lair. The lightless crypts, the sheer stone steps, the sea of fog, the black keep in the cavern, the wretched old man that had nearly been the end of him—they came to him still in his dreams. He'd tried drowning them first in drink, and then in blood, but neither worked.
And now, here he was, personally overseeing what the city council laughably called a renovation of the borough. It was a desperate measure to clean the city up, in truth. The gangers and killers that had squatted there, as well as the poor bastards with nowhere else to go, had been scattered, and Veney, a senior of the watch, had his hands full trying to keep tabs on the break-ins, assaults, and thievery. The council considered his presence during the work absolutely essential, considering he was their pre-eminent "expert" on vampiric sorcery. He was running on about three hours of fitful sleep at a night, if even that, for the past week. His days were spent going to and from the work site and his offices, being ignored on every front about the frankly absurd dangers and negligible benefits of the "renovation", and telling the guards to try and not openly slaughter pickpockets in the street if they could kindly manage it, thanks.
And then one morning he was told the council wanted to dig into the mountain.
He almost killed a councilman himself at the news. How many vampirists had he personally set his blade to in past few years? What had been the cost each and every time? Oh but this is exactly what he was here for, their finest security measure. So he told them quite plainly that he was off each and every watch case until this was done. That was their problem. They wanted him to oversee this, so he would. But don't come crying to him when someone "important" turned up as a mangled corpse because they crossed the wrong villain.
It was a bright morning when the excavation began, but the stark sunlight felt as if there was something accusatory to it. Veney wholeheartedly agreed. For a full day of anxious waiting he watched two small, old, rotten tenement houses demolished with explosives and hammers, to reveal the black stone of the mountain behind. The idea was they'd open up the city, remove the cramped, squalid conditions that bred disease and bad ideas. Not in itself something to deride. But blood of his kin, had they no better alternatives? On the second day, they began blasting open the rock, and that was when something crawled into the pit of Veney's stomach, and festered. Images kept coming to him. Yawning tunnels leading into evil lairs, or shapes slinking out in the dust or at night, or sure, landslides burying the entire borough. On the third day, revolving teams of labourers began to hack away at the mountain, with other teams carting the debris away outside the city. The stone had a strange quality to it. It was both ashy and damp. Oily and gritty. It was organic in a way that made Veney's gorge rise when he touched it.
On the fourth day, Veney was falling asleep in a worksite tent when a shout jolted him back to consciousness.
He stood before the great rent in the rock, muttering a string of terrified curses under his breath. They had hit a void, the workmen had said, or rather...a chamber. But this was virgin rock, they also said, solid mountain, so their small explosion sounding tests had reported, and those were reliable. Veney had to remind them just what it was they were tunnelling through. What it was, where it came from, and what came from it. The excited and nervous chatter fell silent quickly after that.
Veney used his authority to its fullest breadth: he took the team leader and two workers with him, absolutely no one else was to even set a single foot in this hole. If anything other than them even showed a flicker in the dark, blast it shut, do not question him. Keep an eye on your fellows—if anyone's looking at the void too long, put them under watch, do not send them away. Get some drinks handy, something strong and fermented, for he had found they sometimes kept influences at bay. And so Veney, Inquisitor of the Watch, and Tanith, the stout team leader, armed with swords procured on the double from a guardhouse, set into the darkness followed by two gruff older chaps bearing torches and muttering prayers to the old blood.
The length of it was sundered, shattered rock passage, evidently damaged by the tunnelling and explosives, but, he noticed with quiet alarm, knowing exactly what to look for, not natural in the slightest. It had been shaped. Not unevenly by hand, but by the image of will. Even in its dishevelled state, he could picture the uniformity which comes with a desire burnt into the world through sorceries of domination. The things which had made this place had known exactly what they wanted. Memories of the tenement on Bray Lane came back unbidden. He remembered how a vampirist had, from some leagues away, tugged at his very blood, and had drawn him into a living nightmare. There was no tug on him this time, no draw upon his flesh. It was the only thing he found at all promising or hopeful.
Some few minutes later, they found themselves inside something else. It wasn't at all safe, physically or otherwise, to be in here, Tanith kept reminding him. She was right, her bright eyes darting around the ancient stone from which streams of dust fell with their steps. The entrance was littered with short, thick pillars that had collapsed in the excavation. Inside, was a low, domed chamber, and Veney realized now that that there had been no sign of an entrance from the other end. And as he looked about the round room, ignoring for the moment as best he could the seven stone sarcophagi which set his heart racing, there was no other entrance or exist. Blood of his kin, he swore over and over, blood of the old ones, blood of the world, what power had these devils to step through leagues of solid stone and seal themselves in this airless darkness? And for what purpose? But, he reminded himself, the mountains were not natural. They belonged to the vampirist. That these tombs were vampiric he had no doubt. Every little hallmark made itself clear as day in their diabolical ornamentation, their gloating, their domineering. And that they were far older than he could even remotely put a guess to was also clear from his unfortunate experiences—and that fact he really didn't want to think about.
Veney did not actually know what to do. Would they wake up? Were they already spreading some dark sorcery as the light of the living world hit them? Was their subtle miasma flooding out into the town as they stood here? Or had these things been forgotten, or lost? Some experiment, some product of a nameless spell left to rot? There might still be time before every bad thought in Veney's head had time to manifest itself. The workers still had some of their tools with them. He was taking no chances. One at a time, he, Tanith, and the two men prised off and threw back the heavy stone lids, and with each resounding crash, Veney expected these desiccated avatars of antediluvian horror to shudder to immane existence. But they didn't move an inch. They didn't flinch or respond with anything but cracking bones and dust as iron spikes were driven into each chest repeatedly and heads hacked off with swords. No screams, no howls, no flailing claws, or skittering spidery shadows rose as fire consumed them like bone-dry kindling.
The city council, Veney decided, would make do with what had been done already. "Blow it back into the dark," was what he suggested as he headed off for a drink.
Dragon's Deep
More than half the armour had been cast away days ago. Only the breastplate, elbow guards, and bracers remained, the back section of the cuirass refitted into a crude, and much smaller, but effective shield. The plain yet supple boots were procured, at cost, after her initial retreat from the foreboding woods. The leather satchel tied about her waist, which now held her precious curative water, meagre provisions, and scrolls, she'd scrounged that from a well-decayed corpse inside a dead tree. The iron gauntlets, shin greaves, chain coif, and length of rope that all hung at her side and upon her back, those came from a chance discovery: some old adventurer's tucked away chest of belongings half-buried under a rock overhanging. It had gone untouched for what looked to be a long time, wreathed in moss and webs. Likely it had belonged to one such as she, using the area as a base of expeditions before they'd fled, or died. The small, wedge-headed axe was taken from the grip of a wildman who had attacked her, and refitted, quite expertly in her opinion, with a long shaft made from good forest wood.
No one ever came prepared. That's what the old woman had said, back in the hamlet which dwelt in the shadow of the mountain. And she, thinking he could march right into the dragon's deep, clad from head to toe in shining plate, shield, longsword, and with only a bedroll and small field kit of tools and scrolls, had scoffed at that.
She ducked along a mere lip of rock overlooking a gulf of absolute darkness through which gusts of air were flung about with a hollow roar. Behind her, long curling fangs bared, taloned feet scraping on the bare stone, beastmen inexorably drawn by the dragon's might scrabbled over each other to give chase. She only gave one or two glances over the edge of the shelf of rock. The dragon dwelt somewhere below even that illimitable darkness. The mountain went down, down, much further down than it did reach up. She threw one look back—they were closing in. Had she any of those long, sharp darts she'd found left it might have given here the edge. But alas, the last of them had been used to ward off a huge, thin spider that lived in a system of passages she'd stumbled into. As of yet she hadn't had to use any of the scrolls the castle magician had prepared. Lengths of supple vellum held fast with wax seals easily crushed in one hand, and each one weighted with three little metal balls hanging from lengths of thin cord, so the scroll would unfurl of its own accord. They were precious in the extreme. But it had to be done.
She slid out one of the scrolls, running a thumb over the waxen seal to make sure she it was the right one, crushed and flung the roll open, and spoke the charm of command that completed the spell inscribed upon the sheet. In an instant, the closest beastman—far too close—suddenly burst into searing hot flame. The noise it made was horrible, but it tumbled back and knocked two others off the edge and into the abyss with it. It bought her enough time as the others staggered back to reach end of the ledge and fling herself forward as fast as she could manage.
Even this far down, there were still people—strange people, and the ruins and remains they left behind. A day, or was it two days ago, she passed through a sort of village squatting amidst the damp crypts of a race of beings she'd never seen before. The people, filth-encrusted, furtive, bent of back, and pale-eyed from their time in the dark, were apparently worshipping the strange old mummies. Dirty yellow candles with sickly flames burned all over the place, but crowded mostly before the open tombs along with brownish bones arranged in little stacks, crude clay bowls filled with chunks of meat and fungus, and, she quietly panicked upon seeing, human skulls. In others the place was lit with long strips of oil-stained linen simply shoved into nooks and let burn slowly. It gave the entire crypt complex the aspect of a wound corpse being slowly consumed by fire. She'd only passed through the place safely by professing that she was a pilgrim, and presented a rather decorative but empty vial as an offering to a trio of club-wielding men whose eyes gleamed in the firelight in a way human eyes ought not to.
She was not a student of magic, and had, by her own admission, a pretty cool relationship with the castle magician. Everything she had learned had not been of her own volition. She viewed the fragile balance of blasphemy, supplication, trickery, and domination that they more often lost than kept as a barely necessary factor in life above. But still, it was there, and had, she supposed every so often, its uses. Even then, she shuddered at the laboratories in which experiments were performed to see what kind of awful things responded to what kind of horrid bait, and she felt actively nauseous gazing upon the rows upon rows of chained cages, shrouded urns, sealed boxes, and iron chests bearing massive locks in which, she was told, were imprisoned demons, kept at bay and whipped into service by the utterances and inscriptions of the Sacral Tongue.
The demon-prisons in the chamber she now passed through must have been horribly old. Sitting there for years, decades...maybe longer, locked in those bound cylinders and those festooned flasks, thinking in the darkness. Like so much the lands below the mountain—which she truly thought of them as—it was abandoned, silent, musty, clammy. Her torch cast too many moving shadows for her to be comfortable. The wizards who dwelt down here were as fascinated by the dragon as the cults and beasts. But wizards wanted power, and needed demons to grant it. From what she'd seen, and by now it had been a few times, it never went well. Perhaps the dragon did not take kindly to having scraps of its power taken or siphoned, or to be challenged, or have its domain encroached upon by wizards and their legions of vile spirits.
She looked at something, a short metal rod of some wavering, coiling design—it looked organic in the torchlight, she thought, as if captured and smothered in quicksilver. It sat half fused to a slab of a similar material, she guessed perhaps once a bubbling vat of some liquid metal substance, long hardened. All of it sat under an intricately detailed, grotesque, and occult idol, some representation, she felt, of the dragon's power. Or, for all she knew, the dragon itself. It sat upright, like a person might, on stout beast-like legs, four great wings like a cloak and mantle about it, neck long and curling, its head was a mass of hairs, or feelers upon a sharp snout, maybe a beak, and a mass of eyes shaped like a diamond under a crown of horns. Its arms were mighty-thewed and bore talons which grasped the disc of the world in one, and an antiquated lord's sceptre in the other. She looked back down at the rod and wondered.
The scrolls in her pack had become jostled, the seals a little damaged, but they held, and she went through them carefully until she set her hand upon the correct item: a scroll of divination. She was not privy to the mechanics, she didn't care to know, but it would apparently tell her the exact nature of whatever she pointed it at, or something. She spoke the charm of command and decided it was best to specify the metal rod just in case. As she did so, her torch fell to the stone floor, images and sounds began to flood her mind, and sensations like creeping insects run in waves over her flesh. Eyes. A red flash. Thunder like wingbeats. Eyes. Intense heat. Eyes. Eyes. A shadow. Blinding red—she fell back, throwing the spent scroll away, hands covering her face, and knocked into something. She wheeled about, her blurred vision coming into focus as a hand swung at her. She ducked and staggered, hand shooting her sword hilt. Something else emerged close to her, a hand of long fingers reaching out. There was a rumble in the room, bathed in shifting murk. No time to grab the torch. She knew which scroll to lay her hand on. She crushed it, flung it out, and speaking the charm, noticed nothing happened to the lumbering, shambling thing. But it did light up the room for a brief moment, enough to see the stunted wings, hunched backs, dragging tails, and sloughing scaled flesh over rugose demonic bones of the two horrors which sneered and spat with an agonized, impotent fury. Even she felt a pang of disgust and pity to see what spirits under the dominion of the dragon looked like.
But they had to be beaten back at all costs. No sword or spell would work, she felt this. She kept both them in her vision as she began to shuffle backwards, and lay a hand upon the dragonflame rod. The divination scroll had imparted to her that much. Gods beyond, someone really had done it, and had never lived to see it complete. She could guess what had happened. She slipped her gloved finger into whatever grip she could find, and wrenched with a burst of force the wand from its flimsy fusings to the slab. It was magic, though, was it not? At least she guessed it must have been. And magic—compelling demons—needed Sacral Tongue to make it work. An activation phrase. There was no way to know what had been worked into this thing, and the scroll had revealed nothing. Maybe it had none. Worth a try, though. She spoke the charm used on her scrolls, and what looked to her like a wall of fire screamed forth to engulf half the chamber and the two demons which cowered before it, shoving every single rotting accoutrements of the sorcerer's art off every shelf and chain and across the floor, the heat singing her skin and hair, hissing upon the metal of her armour and blade—she leapt back with a shout, the wand falling from her hand and rattling hollow upon the stone. Tongues of flame clung to things around the dead wizard's lair, which let her see just enough to slip the wand into her pouch gently, and construct a new torch.
They say everyone in the whole world feels the pull, even if only slightly, and even if they don't have any capacity for the quest—most don't—it fascinates all the same. It fascinates, or it fosters greed, or kindles desire. Ancient and god-like, yet beyond the gentle gods of ancestral tales: the dragon is myth incarnate. The quest that has consumed the kin of a thousand clans, high and low, wise and brash, pious and impure, it was the quest to seek it, to find it, but after that, who could say? And so, the mountain would be infested with everyone and everything that had ever been and would be drawn by the dragon, until finally, in its primordial deeps at the center of all creation, someone finds it. Or finds it, and returns.
They all think they'll be the one, the old woman had said, and the knight had believed it, because she herself believed she would be the one. After all, someone had to.