I never chose to be this. I want that to be made unmistakably clear. I never chose the course of my life, the spin that my path threw on our ordered existence. In fact, had I, in the moment before my soul was tied to this fate, been given the option, I would have stayed in the nothingness of Oblivion before willingly binding my feet to this path. I weep daily at the lives that have been destroyed in the wake of my journey, and the cries of their passing will ring always through my mind. I never chose to be this, and I would give all that I am for someone to take it away from me.

But there is no one else, and so I am left alone, the weight of my secrets crushing me.

Perhaps you think you would like to hear of this wretched destiny of mine. Perhaps you think it should make a fascinating tale, a riveting legend to tell your grandchildren when they someday totter on your knobby old knee. You are wrong. You will hate to hear my story; you will listen, sickened and mesmerized at once, praying to the gods that you did not hear what I have to tell, yet at the same moment helpless before your compulsion to listen. Just as I am helpless before the compulsion to tell you.

So shall you sit, now caught within the riptide current of my passing, to bear silent witness to what has gone before. Listen well, yet bar the shutters of your fragile mind, for there are some here who will be destroyed by the end of my telling, and I should not wish it to be you...

_______

I was born as you were - son to a mother, expunged from her body with the desperate haste reserved for the most foul of cankers and sent howling into the cold world beyond. I screamed my outrage as the midwives washed the blood from my wrinkled skin. I squealed my anger as they sucked the mucus plug from my nose. I squirmed and wriggled and fought as they bound my newborn body in the blanket and offered me to the woman who had created me.

But I was silent when she failed to reach for me, her ghost-pale hand lying limp on the mattress and her glassy eyes staring sightlessly at the sky above. Fate whispered in my ear...

I lived, though, as many of you did, growing in the care of relatives and fosters, running and playing with the other children, enjoying the excesses of the good years and suffering with my village through the bad ones. I was loved as much as any parentless child can be, and treated with the greater part of kindness and justice. I had a grandfather much like yours, a wizened old man who taught me of honor and the ways of the Ancient Powers. I had young friends, a first love, and the occasional opponent. I had games to play, chores to complete, and dangers to face throughout my childhood, just as you did. But I also had Fate silently crooning to me throughout it all.

You see, I told such tales even then that no one could resist sitting and listening to what I had to say. When I stopped in the village center, listening to the whisper in my mind, the citizens flocked to me just as you did, today, unknowing that they'd left chores half-finished and errands incomplete. Wordlessly they sat in a great circle around me, young beside old, mother beside murderer, two score of faces turned to regard me in obeisance to an inescapable compulsion. I looked out on them as I do now on you, letting the words flow from my lips.

For many years, I truly believe that my words were still innocent, as if you yourself told the tale instead of this Instrument of Fate. But in time, She gathered Her power closer to my heart, and men would find themselves ill and pale at the end of my telling. Women would frown and clutch at their thudding hearts, wondering why they suddenly felt like the stag who had just felt the breath of an arrow that had barely missed their soft flesh. They would return to their chores deeply confused and finding themselves pondering the sins in their lives. Those who were wise would often seek the village priest at sunset, wishing to absolve their guilt. Those who were foolish merely shook their heads and turned their thoughts to the words of my stories, ignoring what their souls had felt.

That moment when they would walk away, some to salvation, was the only in my life that cruel Fate would fall silent. I have wondered since if She was silent in approval or in the foreknowledge of grief. ...

Still, life went on, and my youth flowed away with the sands of the hourglass. Like you, my child's body grew and changed until it had become an adult's, and like you, I found myself troubled and excited at once by all that would be mine as a man. Had I but known, I would have railed and cursed at the Voice that was my companion. I would have begged to remain forever a youth, forever ignorant of my Role. But I did not know, and so I squandered the last of my youth, with its innocence and wonder, in attempts to play the adult I would become, as many of you have done. It was gone all too quickly, and in the moment when youth had truly faded from my life, the only barrier to Fate's design finally fell.

That day will be forever carved into the crystalline spires of my memory, a day of both Destiny and misery, when I became aware of the cursed nature of my existence and the deplorable role that Fate had set me into. On the first day of the last cycle of the moon, I told the tale that passed final judgment on my village. After years of warning, many had blessedly cleansed their lives and minds, but elder Cordys, missus Aenwer, and neighbor Psorisus had not. They each staggered under the weight of my words, feeling the horrible judgment that was upon them until the moment that they were found guilty and fell dead to the ground. Those three were the first to know Fate's cleansing, and I finished my tale with my tears wet upon my cheeks.

The others were horrified. They knew nothing of the terrible sins of their peers. They did not have the voice of Fate whispering to them about Cordys' perverse abuse of the young daughter who had died the month before, about the rapture Aenwer found in Psorisus' arms while her husband was out hunting. They knew only that three lives had ended beneath the power of my compelling tale, and they each, to the smallest child, turned to me with eyes that held horror, anger, and fear. Perhaps they would have sought my death, but Fate ordained that it should not be, should never be, and by her influence their thoughts and hands were stayed against me.

I would not have cared had they come for my blood, for I knelt numbly upon the black dirt, listening once more to the Voice of Fate within me. Those words, long ago forgotten, wended their way into my mortal soul, slipped along the life streams of my mortal body, and changed all that I was into all that I was to become, an Instrument, a Weapon forged in the fire of the Divine and quenched in the cold grief of tears.

I sagged to the ground in grief and shock and weakness. Within me, She whispered of my mission, my duty, of the suffering that was to be mine and that I was to carry to others. As the people I had known all my life made the signs of devotion over their hearts and bowed before me, She whispered of the Dark Corruption that we would undertake to destroy. She crooned cold comfort into my ear as I cried for myself, for those who would die, and for those who would mourn. And in time, She compelled me forward, forcing me to set my feet on the path that would lead to my eternal existence.

Thus, I came to travel the world. In every town I enter, I sit as I do today, telling my story to the crowd compelled by Fate to hear it. I invariably find many worthy of my attentions, for the Corruption is strong in the hearts of men. In every town I stride away from, I leave many voices wailing in grief. I could never wail with them, but for long years, everywhere that I walked my tears wet the ground beneath my feet. Fate caressed my brow as I suffered...

Lifetimes ago, I cried my last tear, the well of heart within me run dry by my eons of cleansing. And though I still grieve with all the power of my soul, the ground will not be wetted as I leave this place. It was destiny's only gift to me, the only concession from a Power that had created me for an eternity of misery. For I am He that was sent to Cleanse this land, and my place in the great order is to wander the world of mortals, judging the worth of the souls they have created for themselves. You who still hear my words have been found worthy of the gift of life that the gods have given you, while those beside you who lay dead felt the Divine Flame burn their souls to ash through my voice.

Grieve your dead, mortal Children of the gods, but always remember their Fate and the mistakes that they made to bring them to their end. For you never know when my journey will bring me back to this place, and my story will burn in your ears once more. There will be no warning, and no forgiveness for you pristine few who have allowed your souls to tarnish.

...