Prologue
Prologue
(An open journal over an old map of Europe. The pages are worn, the ink dark.)
Silver Maiden...
Roughly 1100 years ago, she was born at the foot of a mountain, in a village no map remembers, in the northeast of Europe.
She was a fearless swordswoman who walked all across Europe and many a distant land, from the age of sixteen until her death at sixty-three.
Her true name was never recorded. The villagers who might have remembered it are long gone, and the journal that follows keeps only the title the world gave her. But before the title, there was a child, and the child had a village.
It was a small place, a scatter of timber houses pressed against the slope of a mountain, where winter arrived early and left late. Smoke rose from the roofs, the river froze at the edges, and the road that led out of the valley was so rarely used that grass grew down its middle.
She was born the daughter of a simple peasant, and the whole village knew her as a curious, quietly watchful child.
She had pale hair that her mother braided each morning, and clear blue eyes that seemed to take in more than a girl her age should notice. She did not shout or run in circles like the other children. She sat on the hill above the village and watched the road, the clouds, and the way the wind moved through the pines. When something puzzled her, she did not ask at once. She waited, studied it, and only then spoke.
Her father mended tools and tilled stony fields. Her mother wove and told stories. Neither of them could answer the question the girl carried, and she asked it more often as she grew: what lay beyond the mountain?
Above all else, she longed to see the lands that lay beyond the mountains of her home.
(Dusk. A single figure walks up the empty road toward the village.)
It was not until one fateful day, when a traveler wandered into her village...
The traveler came at the end of autumn, on the very edge of the first snow. A tall, weathered figure in a long coat, with a pack on one shoulder and a sword worn smooth at the hilt. On the coat’s shoulder was a small blue shield with a white horse on it, the mark of the Adventurers’ Guild. Few in the village had ever seen it. No one had ever seen a stranger who looked so completely at ease on a road that long.
The villagers gave the traveler a place by the fire and a bowl of broth. The children gathered close, as children do. The girl did not sit with them. She stood a little apart, near the door, and listened.
The traveler spoke of harbors where ships from a hundred lands crowded the water. Of the vast, glittering city at the edge of the east, where the roofs were gold and the markets never slept. Of the cold northern coasts, where the sea froze into plains of ice, and of the southern passes where the sun was warm enough to melt the loneliness out of a person. Of beasts and bandits and storms. Of people who shared their bread with a stranger and asked nothing in return.
When the others fell asleep, the girl was still awake.
“Is it true?” she asked quietly. “All of it?”
The traveler looked at her for a long moment, as if weighing something. “Every word,” came the answer. “And there is more than I could tell in a lifetime.”
“Then what is it?” the girl asked. “An adventurer. What are they, really?”
The traveler smiled, and the firelight caught the old scars on the weathered hands. “Someone who walks the road without knowing where it ends,” the traveler said, “and who keeps walking anyway.”
(Morning. The road, white with frost. A small girl stands at the edge of the forest, a walking stick in hand, watching the traveler disappear over the hill.)
...that she first glimpsed what it truly means to live as an adventurer.
The traveler left at dawn and did not look back. Nobody in the village thought much of it. But the girl stood at the end of the road long after the figure had vanished, and the wind that came down off the mountain seemed, for the first time, to be pulling in a direction.
She was still a child, and the road was still long. It would be years before the Guild’s blue shield rested on her own shoulder, before a slender sword called Arondight hung at her hip, and long before the world gave her the name that outlived her own.
But that morning, standing in the cold with her pale braid stirring in the wind, she made a quiet decision. She did not say it aloud. She simply began, from that day on, to prepare.
(The pages turn. The map slides south and west, away from the mountain, across all of Europe. The journal falls open to a blank leaf, and a hand begins to write.)
This journal records her journeys.
