But Hast Thou Met the Shadow Boss...?
I asked the girl if she had and knew that she had not. For while she, all unknowing, was the One spoken of in song and prophecy, still she would have been among the shadows themselves if she had met the Shadow Boss as she was back then. The prophecies are specific and I should know, for I wrote them back in the days of my youth, when the world was young and the Shadow Boss was but a nightmare on the horizon of the future.
The girl looked at me with her usual impishness, saying that I was a fool for believing such things as the Shadow Boss. She often called me fool back then and who can blame her? I had gone to pains to hide myself from the world following the pain of my breaking. The robes that covered my fractured body hid the scars and worse that still wrack my body and threaten terror in the dark hours when the powers of the Son of Lies is strongest.
For I foresaw this girl in my days as a seer, and even before meeting her I loved her with everything in me. And so, knowing that I could do nothing other than falter and die at the hands of the Enemy, I pitted all the might I had amassed against the Lord of All Dark, the Shadow Boss, and he proved the stronger of us both. We knew that he would, which made this all the worse.
I know it would be the words of this conversation that would send her on the quest. She would thing me a fool, think the task I would send her on a lark and a joy, but she would face a thousand evil and do so with a strength and a light that would drive back and eternal black. She would find the Gate of the Rose and find the Paladin that graced that place, she would take the Crest that haunted the ashes of the Phoenix Grave.
And, more than this, it was she that would find and return to the world the one people that the Shadow Boss ever had cause to fear. With one of their kind by her side, she would face down the awful power of the Shadow Boss and she would triumph - for in all the world, there has never been a fighter equal to even the least of the Porcupine Nation.
She left in daylight, from one village to the next, and I knew we would not meet again. When she returned here seeking my consul and the answers that I burned to give and had hinted at for so many years I would be dead, slain by the black knife of the Shadow Boss. I would die with her name on my blood specked lips, and with that thought in my mind I watched her silhouette crest the world and vanish.
It was for the best.
At the end, when the Shadow Boss lay broken and dead at her feet, the darkness that was his swallowed by the greater darkness she would free, she would understand. And then, perhaps, with all that done she could come home at last and we could be once more what we were meant to be.
Such are the dreams of those no longer meant to be heroes. Such are the dreams of the broken.
The girl looked at me with her usual impishness, saying that I was a fool for believing such things as the Shadow Boss. She often called me fool back then and who can blame her? I had gone to pains to hide myself from the world following the pain of my breaking. The robes that covered my fractured body hid the scars and worse that still wrack my body and threaten terror in the dark hours when the powers of the Son of Lies is strongest.
For I foresaw this girl in my days as a seer, and even before meeting her I loved her with everything in me. And so, knowing that I could do nothing other than falter and die at the hands of the Enemy, I pitted all the might I had amassed against the Lord of All Dark, the Shadow Boss, and he proved the stronger of us both. We knew that he would, which made this all the worse.
I know it would be the words of this conversation that would send her on the quest. She would thing me a fool, think the task I would send her on a lark and a joy, but she would face a thousand evil and do so with a strength and a light that would drive back and eternal black. She would find the Gate of the Rose and find the Paladin that graced that place, she would take the Crest that haunted the ashes of the Phoenix Grave.
And, more than this, it was she that would find and return to the world the one people that the Shadow Boss ever had cause to fear. With one of their kind by her side, she would face down the awful power of the Shadow Boss and she would triumph - for in all the world, there has never been a fighter equal to even the least of the Porcupine Nation.
She left in daylight, from one village to the next, and I knew we would not meet again. When she returned here seeking my consul and the answers that I burned to give and had hinted at for so many years I would be dead, slain by the black knife of the Shadow Boss. I would die with her name on my blood specked lips, and with that thought in my mind I watched her silhouette crest the world and vanish.
It was for the best.
At the end, when the Shadow Boss lay broken and dead at her feet, the darkness that was his swallowed by the greater darkness she would free, she would understand. And then, perhaps, with all that done she could come home at last and we could be once more what we were meant to be.
Such are the dreams of those no longer meant to be heroes. Such are the dreams of the broken.