Lusk, meticulously wiping the barghest’s black, sticky blood from his dagger, shrugged. “We’re in the wilderness, Cserhelm. We can’t control every handbreadth of the mountain.” He sighed. “I suppose I should get my arrow back, but I don’t want to crawl down after that thing.”
She stared at the beast’s body and at the remains of the deer. There must have been fifteen or twenty. “We should have been aware of this kind of predation. And I didn’t expect there to be three.” She still heard the big male barghest’s last scream, before it impaled itself on her sword, full of rage but also a kind of despair. It was the same kind of despair a barghest could inflict upon its prey, but heartfelt within itself. Why? Was the skunk-striped barghest its mate?
“Perhaps the chasm does extend to the Underdark,” remarked Lusk, giving the blade a final polish and sheathing it, “where the eldritch spawn of Rophile roam. Listen!” He put his hand to his ear. “Can’t you hear them?”
On the breeze came the faint bleating of sheep, probably from a herd grazing in the meadows below. Lakini laughed, ignoring the pain in her side. At least the lycanthropes wouldn’t be preying on the crofter’s flocks.
Lakini knew the gouge in her side would heal quickly, but she suspected it would be a long time before the baffled roar of the barghest faded from her mind.
“Come home,” she said, laying her hand briefly on Lusk’s arm. “You’ve not even paid respects to Shadrun yet, and the Vashtun will want to see you.”
The Vashtun had not always been the Vashtun, of course. His birthname had been discarded and forgotten long before. The sanctuary keeper of Shadrun-of-the-Snows was always called the Vashtun; the name of the first keeper had become a title over the length of years.
Years before, in the Year of Azuth’s Woe, that first Vashtun, a quiet, unassuming city scribe, had laid aside his transcription of the bloated history of a rich merchant’s ancestors, tied his ink pot and quills at his side, and walked away from the busy streets and commerce of his native place, walked into the heart of the country, down a road teeming with market folk, private guards, and weary would-be adventurers in search of coin to be made honestly or not. He passed dwarves bound for town to negotiate trade treaties, halflings in search of a day’s labor and mischief afterward, and farmers taking their town goods home. At night he would sleep by the side of the road in the travelers’ shelters raised by local lordlings or town councils for the public good, drinking from public wells and sharing food with fellow journeyers if they had it to spare.
He walked roads farther and farther away from human habitation, and when he came upon a crooked mountain path that pleased him, he turned aside from the main road and climbed up, past oaks clustered thick and twisted at the mountain’s foot, past thickets of pine and deep, white-barked, rustling birch to where ferns grew in a sunny meadow stretched in the sun beneath the peaks and ravines of the summit. There he found the remains of a forgotten temple, little more than blocks of moss-grown marble tumbled around the warm trickle of a mineral spring. He found the carved onyx head of some ancient, obscure godling, cleaned the dirt from its time-worn features, and propped it up against the ruins of a retaining wall. He washed his road-sore feet in the warm, slightly sulfurous waters of the spring and found himself a comfortable seat in last season’s fallen leaves. Vashtun sat contemplating the long and crooked snakelike road that coiled between the cities of the plains.
He had spent so many days putting one foot before the other in such a steady rhythm that the simple action had become hypnotic. Gone was the strange impulse that made him set aside the heavy parchment, filled with line after line of neat writing, push back the chair from the slanted desk, and leave the rich man’s library to walk ceaselessly. Now he wanted nothing but to make his mind a blank, like a blown glass bulb containing a perfect vacuum. He wasn’t bored, or frightened. Sometimes he felt a little hungry or thirsty, but to stir from his perch to find berries or water would stir the still, cold waters of his mind, so he pushed such sensations away.
As the sun reached its zenith, a crofter a few miles away spotted crows circling, curious, over the ruins and sent his child to see what went forward. The boy returned an hour later to say a man was there, with strange clothing and nothing but a pouch at his hip, and he had found an old god in the dirt and restored it to the spring. The strange man said nothing but watched the horizon with an abstract smile.
The crofter’s wife sent the child back with a bottle of mead and a basket of bread and fruit paste, as well as an old patched cloak against the night chill, for it was clear to her a holy man had been sent to guard the old spring at Shadrun. Word spread to the other crofters in the foothills, keepers of the mountain cattle that thrived on the rough brush and stiff grasses of the slopes, the rangers that wandered the woods, and finally to the villages rooted below, the same villages the scribe had passed in his journey. Folk came to see him, to bring him food and what few items he seemed to need. He looked upon everyone with the same dispassionate smile, and he did not resist placing his hand on their heads when they kneeled before him and asked it.
Some of the men built him a simple shelter with the cracked, chipped blocks of the old shrine. Others restored the retaining wall around the spring, and the steps going up to it, so that again it pooled, warm and steaming, before trickling away between moss-blanketed boulders. Passive as a child fed his dinner and tucked into bed, he watched as these things were done, but anyone who kneeled before him and looked into his eyes knew that behind their benign, blue-sky expression, an encompassing intelligence moved.
Sometimes when someone sat beside him, breathing the same way and able, over the course of hours or days, to focus on nothing, they felt a tickle in their mind, a sense of someone outside of them possessing their senses. Some heard a whispering in an incomprehensible language, drifting through their brain like the cold insinuation of the winter wind. Most who sat and meditated with the holy man Vashtun did not attempt it again, leaving the task of communing with the gods to those with the inclination for it. One, the dreamy son of a stolid crofter, began weeping after an hour of sitting at Vashtun’s feet and refused to ever go near the spring again (on the positive side, he became far more industrious in the fields and sheep pens then he ever had been before). But there were those few who seemed to thrive on the same strange state the holy man manifested, who stayed with him as the air thickened with cold and the snows came. With the help of the locals, they added to the shrine shelter, making it a warm place to stay throughout the winter, heated with steam from the spring.
When the thaw came, a trickle of pilgrims, some from the cities of the plains, some from far beyond them, began to arrive. The locals were glad to guide such visitors up the crooked mountain paths for a small fee, and also to house and feed them, likewise for a small fee. Over time, the mountain path became a decent-sized and passable road, and small houses and inns sprang up beside it to take care of the travelers’ needs. The tiny ruined shrine beside Shadrun spring was expanded and rebuilt to become Shadrun-of-the-Snows, a refuge for the weary traveler as well as the questing pilgrim. The lords of cities and estates, as well as forward-looking merchants, sent tribute and manpower to Shadrun-of-the-Snows, for here was a sanctuary and safe resting place for those journeying between domains and kingdoms, where one could rest and recover, safe from mercenaries, beasts, and bandits, before proceeding on one’s way.
Vashtun became the Vashtun, served and protected by those who found comfort in always being in his presence. After the length of his days was done and he was buried on the slopes above the sanctuary, another took his place. Having spent long hours meditating with the Vashtun, the thrumming, insistent whisper that pervaded the holy man’s mind possessed his as well. Never himself a scribe, he tied the old pouch of scribes’ tools at his belt, and all called him the Vashtun. He was protected and served in his turn, as was the case with the one who came after him, and the one who came after her. There were many who thought, hundreds of years later, that the same silent and meditative Vashtun sat in a quiet room at the shrine of Shadrun-of-the-Snows, and in some ways they were correct.