A Report From a Traveling Merchant

It was an unseasonably warm day, a welcome change from the bleak winter, so I decided on a walk that took me to the small town of Elmerton. As I was coming upon a crossroads on the outskirts of the town, there was a large explosion and a flash of fire shot out of the ground in front of me! Startled, I hid behind a tree peeking around cautiously so I could see what was going on. What I saw next completely rattled my mind.

A strange man with a large, strange device on his back climbed out of a new, still smoking hole in the ground. He was pulling a litter behind him on which was tied a shorter, stout man’s body. He dragged the litter off to the side of the crossroads and, laying it down gently, he went back into the hole he had made. He resurfaced a few moments later with a large stone pillar on his shoulder and planted it vertically at the crossroad. He reached down and untied the other man (from the rigidity of the body, I could only assume he was dead and likely had been for days) and lifted the corpse, propping it against the pillar.

The strange man then took the thing off his back and placed it at the dead man’s feet. From my vantage point it looked like he was messing with some kind of black vines that were sticking out of a pair of red cylinders. After a few minutes, the man stood up and looked at the dead man, a deep sadness crossing his features. It was then I began to hear a faint humming sound that slowly and steadily grew louder and louder, eventually reaching a level that made me think my eardrums were going burst! It stopped for a brief second before a powerful pulse of force emanated from the pack and I saw a pillar of blinding white light shot into the skies. A secondary ring of energy pulsed out from the white light and stretched as far as I could see in all directions before disappearing completely.

In the dancing shadow impressions the dazzling light left on my eyes, I could see that the strange man was still standing there looking at the dead man, but something was different. The stone pillar had disappeared and the dead man was standing along, unsupported, holding a gleaming sword, as if he had been a statue of a knight in a tomb. The strange man spoke softly to the statue, “ Now uncle, you can watch over all this area, and protect it all forever.”

With a final glance, the strange man walked back into the hole he made, and it seemed to seal up behind him, like it was never there. After a few moments, I walked over to inspect the sword of the dead man- logic dictates that one shouldn’t leave a good sword for someone else to steal- and as I got close, I could see that the dead man was made of stone. It looked as though he had become a statue, though, oddly, his stony hair seemed to move in the breeze. Undaunted, I reached for the sword, but as I did, the statues eyes opened up, bright and clear.  At that point, my wits had had enough and I ran for it leaving sword and statue-man for the next traveler to deal with.