Vegaroth

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gwaihir1

Poet

Posts: 48

(12/2/01 1:41:15 pm)

Reply Vegaroth

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I think this will be the intro:

 

It came out by accident. He would never have told me his true name if I’d just asked I think. We were sitting in his office, and he was telling me a story about his childhood, describing an incident in which he’d been accused of stealing a pie. He said that his mother had called out his real name, and he’d almost fainted terrified by such a portent.

His mother had used his real name! How unwise! I was shocked. I didn’t mean to but I blurted out. “Your real name?!! Looking back, I’m amused that though I thought myself so grown up just to be listening to a story told by the man who was probably more important and powerful than anyone else in the country. I had no poise at all though.

“Yes”, he said “Vegaroth”.

I think I fell out of my chair. “I … I ….I just meant surprise that your mother used your real name aloud, Sir”

He offered me his hand to get up. “I know, but you shouldn’t sit on the floor there, it has all sorts of nasty powders on it, you’ll have a hole in your hand.”

“Sir, did you say what I think you did”?

“My real name? Yes. Don’t go sharing it. I wanted someone else alive to know it just for safety’s sake in case I needed some sort of emergency help. You have the good sense, and aren’t important enough that people would suspect you of knowing.”

Well, if he favored me so much, my future was certainly made.

Sure enough, it was he who got me the command to go fight undead in Pagine. That was a horrible war, I’ve never hated anything as much. They don’t smell like dead bodies, they smell like someone’s thrown up the nastiest sort of mold imaginable. I still see them coming to give me their “hug” in my nightmares.

Shudder.

All the same though, it was a very honourable position, I gained much respect for having done it. I think it was when I came back from that campaign that he formally offered to let me be his Follower, one of the Forty. I came into the room to report to him, sweaty and dirty like you wouldn’t believe. Not any state that one should ever enter one’s lord’s presence in, but he’d sent a message ordering me to report the second I got back, and I did have pressing news.

I entered the room and guessed there were about fifty people in there. Everyone looked at me as if I was expected, but with kind of a laugh in their eyes at my dress. I tried to retreat, horrified. He had seen though, and called me in. Nothing more embarrassing has ever happened, I could have preferred transformation into even Jello to that! I apologized for my appearance, but he did not answer instead extending his right hand. I, baffled gave him mine. He looked into my eyes and asked me if I would accept his mantle.

Of course after that I bought a house in the capital so as to be closer to where things were happening. I had better commands, and the right to advise him on his most secret decisions.

I remember that by this time people were always trying to make him tell someone his Name, telling him that he was old, he might get into an accident, and not be able to perform his own magic… For years and years he just been smiling when they said that, but one day when I’d been allowed to sit in that hall (the hall of the Forty, where he spoke) about six years he finally answered:

“I told my name twenty years ago. The man I spoke to is still alive, he can hear me now.”

The hall was in a whir. WHO? I think everyone in there was discussed multiple times, his main old timers were asked if they were the one until they were ill. The younger ones of us though were pretty quickly passed over. In fact, some came to the conclusion that it was not a member of the Forty at all, but someone who had been stationed in a hidden place purely to hear that statement.