The air shimmered.
A light breeze blew across the valley as heat waves rose from the warmed rocks on the hillside and larks flew overhead. The afternoon sun chased away the night’s chill and bathed the grasses in a warm blanket as spring arrived in Novindus. A fox sunning herself raised her head in concern, for she smelled something unusual. Springing to her feet she turned her head left and right seeking the source. Curiosity soon gave way to caution and the vixen darted off, bounding into the shadowed woods.
The cause of her fright, a solitary figure, made his way carefully through the thinning trees. At this altitude, the heavy woodlands below gave way to alpine meadows and open reaches providing easier transit.
Any observer would think him barely worth notice. A large hat masked his features. His body appeared neither overly stout nor slender, and his garb simple travelling robes made of grey homespun or poor linen. He carried a sack across one shoulder and used a gnarled black stave made of oak.
The man paused and looked at the peaks to the north and south, noticing their bald crowns above the timberline. They were known by those who lived nearby as the Grey Towers, but he put aside his appreciation of their majesty and instead considered them in a complex evaluation of the valley’s defensibility.
A people once lived here, but invaders had driven them out. Then the invaders eventually departed, but the original inhabitants of the valley never returned. There were signs of their settlements scattered throughout this region, from the deep northern pass, beyond which a large village of dwarves resided, to the south where the high ridges gave way to the sloping hills that led to bluffs commanding the strait between two vast seas.
Like all of his race, the traveller knew little of dwarves to the north, or the seemingly numberless humans. Of those who had lived in this valley before he knew only lore and legend. What little he had pieced together had provided him with more questions than answers.
He had travelled this continent for three months, and was barely noticed by most as he passed; even when seen or spoken to, he was barely remembered. He was an unremarkable being, who may have been tall, or just average; a man of some circumstance, or perhaps of modest means. His hair could have been described as brown, or sandy, or sometimes black. The guise, created by the arts and employed by the traveller, made him difficult to notice or remember.
Looking around, to finalize his sense of the place as much as to ensure he was not being watched, the traveller reached within a belt pouch and withdrew a crystal. It was of no intrinsic value, but it was his most precious possession; his only means of returning to his people. He held tightly to the crystal and let his glamour slip away, revealing his true appearance before his return. Had he stepped through the portal in his magical guise, his death would have been immediate.
The traveller considered it strange that while he did not change physically he felt as if he were casting off clothing that was too small. He took a moment to stretch his long arms before incanting the brief spell that activated the crystal.
There was a sudden sizzling sound, like a small crackle of lightning, followed by a rip in the air that looked like a tall curtain of heat shimmer, then a portal formed above the ground: twelve feet high and nine feet across, a grey oval of nothingness. An instant later the traveller had stepped into it and vanished.
*
Up in the trees, a motionless figure observed the departure. It was by only the most strained of coincidences that he was in this valley at all, for it had been unoccupied since the Riftwar, but the game trails and pathways along the more northern ridges gave faster access to his destination than the more frequently used routes through the Green Heart Forest to the south. Like most of his kind, solitude or anticipation of danger didn’t bother him, but an appreciation of swift passage was keen in the messenger. Of all the mortal races, only the elves had better woodcraft skills than the Rangers of Natal.
He was a tall, lean man, with skin burned dark by the sun, though his brown hair showed streaks of red and blond from the same exposure. His eyes were dark and hooded, his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, and his straight nose gave him an almost hawk-like countenance. Only when he smiled did he lose his grim visage, something that rarely occurred outside the comfort of his home, in the company of family.