The Chronicle

What you hold in your hands, traveller, is the work of my life. I have gathered it from a thousand pieces: from letters and stone tablets, from the songs of the Elves, from the mines of the Dwarves and from the tales of old men who swore their grandfathers had seen it with their own eyes. Some of it is truth. Some of it is legend. And most of it is both at once.

But one thing I confess to you before you begin to read: this chronicle is not complete, and there is much that I myself do not yet know. Too many pages are lost, burned, or were never shown to me. Songs I never heard, and tales that never reached me. Yet one thing I will tell you: there is a place in these writings where I do not write the truth. Not because I am wicked or wish to deceive you, but because that truth wants to be found. If on your travels a page, a letter, a tale should cross your path that contradicts this chronicle, bring it to me. Perhaps we shall finish this book together.

The Origin of the Runes

No one knows when magical power first appeared in Averrunes. The oldest writings tell of whispering voices in deep caves, of glowing veins beneath the earth, and of places where the magic was so strong that even the greatest scholars of their age did not know how to handle it. Whoever ventured there returned changed, if they returned at all.

Yet even those records were written long after that age began. All that is certain is that magic already existed before the first kingdoms were founded.

The Age of the Scholars

In that early epoch, mighty sorcerers, alchemists and scholars lived scattered across the whole world. They served no king and no realm. Their only aim was to understand the unseen forces of Averrunes.

Over generations they studied magical springs, rare ores, ancient stones and creatures suffused with unknown energy. At the heart of their research stood a vast tree that grew deep in a valley now forgotten. It was called Averan.

No one knew how old the tree was. Its roots reached deeper than any mine, its branches towered above the surrounding mountains, and even in the deepest winter it never lost its leaves. Whoever stood long enough in its shade believed they could hear a breathing, deep and slow, as though something greater than the tree itself slept beneath it. Beneath its bark flowed a silver-shimmering resin.

This resin responded to thoughts, to feelings and to spoken words. In its presence objects moved without being touched, wounds closed, and even weak spells could reach an unimagined strength. But the resin alone was unpredictable. It could save a life or burn its bearer. It could fill a mind with knowledge or drive it into madness for ever.

The Making of the Runes

The scholars sought a way to control this power. They discovered that certain signs could guide magical energy. When these symbols were struck into stone, forged iron or wood and bound with the resin of Averan, the raw magic took on a fixed form.

So the first runes came into being. At first they were simple signs. Small runes could make a blade sharper, harden armour, or lend a traveller extra strength for a short while.

But over many centuries the art of the signs was refined further and further. Runes arose for healing, protection, knowledge, speed, strength and magic. Some were forged into weapons, others set into jewellery or burned directly onto the skin of their bearers. Yet it was precisely this that the wise warned against early on: whoever wore a sign upon their own skin carried raw magic unshielded against their body, day and night, and many such bearers succumbed to madness over the years. So it was learned to bind the runes into things rather than into flesh, and whoever still chose the brand did so knowing the price.

The Rune Masters

The mightiest scholars of that age became known as the Rune Masters. They founded schools, libraries and great workshops in which they gathered their findings. Their runes changed Averrunes. Sicknesses could be healed, great cities raised, and even barren stretches of land brought back to life.

But the more runes were created, the clearer it became that their power did not come from Averan alone. The tree was merely a way in to a far older force. Something beyond its roots gave the runes their power. What lay hidden there, not even the greatest rune masters could ever fully explain.

The Six High Runes

After centuries of study, six of the mightiest rune masters succeeded in creating signs of hitherto unreached power. These were not the works of a few years. Each of the six masters devoted an entire life to a single quality of mortal beings, tested hundreds of designs, discarded them again, and let only the perfect stand. What ordinary runes could achieve in small things, these signs were meant to accomplish in great ones.

The first master sought the strength of the body and created the Rune of Strength, the sign of warriors and champions. The second mistress devoted herself to life itself, to its tenacity and its power to heal, and from her hand came the Rune of Vitality. The third master studied movement, the wind, the flight of the falcon and the hand of the archer, and bound all of it into the Rune of Dexterity. The fourth mistress gathered the knowledge of her age, every formula, every language, every secret of magic, and poured it into the Rune of Knowledge. And the fifth master, of whom it is said that he fought all his life against the shadows of his own thoughts, forged the Rune of Will: the sign that makes the mind unbending.

Five signs, five lives, five masterworks. Only the sixth master struck no chisel and poured no resin. He watched the others at their work, studied their signs, and kept silent. And when the others asked him where his own work might be, he is said to have answered only: “My sign is not forged. It comes when yours are ready.”

Five of these signs were forged, the sixth was not. The sixth master, so the story goes, created no rune but recognised something: that a final sign would arise of its own accord as soon as the other five were once again whole and united in full power. Some scholars believe the sixth rune stands for fate, others for connection. Yet what power it would unleash, no one has ever witnessed; its true strength remains unknown to this day.

The Danger of the High Runes

Unlike ordinary runes, the five high runes could change their bearers permanently. They made warriors stronger, mages mightier and healers more resilient. Their greatest peculiarity, however, was that they grew together with their bearer.

The more dangers a rune bearer survived, the more strongly the rune responded to them. Before long, rulers, warlords and influential families began to search for these runes. Everyone wanted their power for themselves.

The rune masters, however, refused to surrender their greatest works. They had recognised that each high rune represented only part of a far greater power. Should the five high runes ever be joined together, something would happen that would call forth the sixth rune. And what that sixth sign would unleash, not even the wisest among them could say. It was this uncertainty the masters feared, more than any war.

The Fall of Averan

What happened in that age, no one knows with certainty. The writings break off, the witnesses are long since dust, and what remains are tales that contradict one another. Some accounts tell of an attack upon the tree Averan. Others say the rune masters fell into strife among themselves. Still others claim that something awoke from the depths beneath the tree’s roots.

In a single night the valley was destroyed. A tremendous magical quake shook Averrunes. The sky above Averan burned for days in a cold, blue fire, and in the villages at the edge of the valley people woke screaming from dreams none of them wished to remember. Travellers reported that the quake had made no sound at all, only left behind a silence so heavy that birds fell dead out of the sky.

When the first travellers reached the valley again, the great tree had vanished. In its place there was only a deep crater whose bottom no one has ever seen. The six rune masters had vanished as well. Their workshops lay in ruins, their writings were burned, and the five high runes had been shattered into shards and scattered across the world. Only a single sign remained: burned into the crater, metres high and still warm, stood a rune that no one knew and that to this day no one has dared to interpret.

So ended the Age of the Scholars.

The Age of the Kingdoms

Many centuries later, new kingdoms arose upon the ruins of the old world. The original rune masters fell into oblivion. Their teachings became legends, and a great part of their knowledge was lost.

The Three Peoples

Three peoples share the reawakened world. The Humans, numerous and restless, built their kingdoms on the wreckage of the old. The mightiest among them is Vardann, a realm of wide fields and proud cities, of which this chronicle has much still to tell. The Dwarves, masters of stone and ore, guard their own royal city deep in the mountains; no people ever understood as they did how to bind runes into rock and iron, and no people keeps more stubbornly silent about what their forefathers once found in the deep. And the Elves, long-lived and few, dwell in their hidden city beneath ancient trees; they are the old knowledge of the world, for they preserve what remains of that distant age: songs, writings and traditions handed down by the scholars, reaching back to the days of Averan’s fall.

There were times when mistrust stood between the three peoples, and times when blood was shed. But the runes taught them a truth greater than any old quarrel: the signs do not ask whose hand holds them. And so there came to pass what earlier ages would have thought impossible: in Valandor, the city of the human king, Dwarves and Elves took their place in the council, equal in voice and equal in honour. A bond was forged that is meant to outlast the ages, and the wise of all three peoples call it the most precious work accomplished since the fall of Averan.

In the reawakened world there are two kinds of runes. There are the ordinary runes: the many small signs such as the first scholars once made. They are found in abandoned temples and workshops, forged into blades, bound into armour, rings and jewellery. They give their bearer a steady, modest advantage: a sharper blade, a firmer guard, a keener eye. Warriors use them to strike harder, mages to strengthen their spells, hunters to sharpen their senses, healers to increase their power.

And then there are the five high runes, and they are of an entirely different kind. Not one of them lies ready anywhere as a finished sign. The fall of Averan shattered them: scattered across the whole world, their fragments, shards and artefacts rest in ruins, in the depths of the earth, in the claws of ancient creatures. Whoever would bear a high rune must find these pieces and put them back together piece by piece, until the sign fills and awakens. It is the work of a lifetime, not of a day.

Yet even a restored high rune is not for ever. Its power is like a flame: it burns down if it is not fed. Since the source of Averan ran dry, a rune bearer must feed their rune with new energy again and again, or its light fades and its power with it. To possess a high rune therefore does not mean to have it; it means to keep it alive.

And somewhere in this reawakened world, scattered across ruins and kingdoms, the shards of the five high runes wait to be found again. Whoever united them all and held them in full power at once, so the legend whispers, to that one the sixth sign would appear. But that has succeeded for no one to this day.

The First Rune War

It took almost a thousand years before the first high rune came back to light. A miner in the kingdom of Vardann drove his pick into a vein of cold iron, and the wall before him began to glow. What he found was the Rune of Strength, and before winter came another was wearing it: Aldric Corveth, warlord of the king and a man whose ambition was greater than his judgement.

Under Corveth the rune grew, just as the old writings had foretold. Every battle he survived made the sign brighter and him stronger. When his scouts recovered a second sign from the ruins of a sunken temple, the Rune of Will, he had it burned into his chest. Two high runes in a single bearer. Something the rune masters had once prevented at any cost.

What followed the chroniclers call the First Rune War. Corveth marched against every neighbouring realm that refused him allegiance. Fear could no longer reach him, curses rebounded, and no blade found its way through his armour. Three kingdoms fell in a single summer.

But the runes exacted their price. The stronger Corveth became, the further he drifted from what had once made him himself. His closest companions told how he had stopped sleeping, how he had spoken for hours at a wall as though someone answered from the other side. In the end it was no army that brought him down, but his own sword-bearer, a boy he had raised. He cut both runes out of his flesh while he slept and vanished with them into the night.

Aldric Corveth died a few days later, an old and bewildered man who could no longer remember his own name. The two runes were never seen together again. And in Vardann a lesson was learned that has run through all the kingdoms ever since: whoever reaches for more than one high rune reaches for their own end.

The Rune Knight

After the fall of Aldric Corveth, many believed the high runes were nothing but a curse, a poison that corrupted everyone who bore them. Yet there is a legend that tells the opposite, and the rune masters guard it like a treasure: the legend of Kaelen the Steadfast, whom the people called the Rune Knight.

Kaelen was no king and no conqueror, but a simple swordsman who set out to stand by the weak. Over a long life full of trials he gathered the fragments of all five high runes: Strength, Vitality, Dexterity, Knowledge and Will. Each one he patiently reassembled into a whole sign. And unlike Corveth, Kaelen heeded the teachings of the old rune masters: never did he burn a sign onto his own skin. His runes he carried bound into sword, shield and chain, exactly as the wise had once commanded. Five runes, of which a single one had driven a Corveth into madness. Yet Kaelen did not fall. He did not turn cruel, nor grandiose, nor cold. He remained what he had always been: just, humble and turned towards people.

From his story the scholars drew the most important lesson about the runes there is: a rune corrupts no one. It only magnifies what already lies in the heart of its bearer. Corveth’s greed grew into madness; Kaelen’s kindness grew into greatness. “It is not the rune that makes the person,” the rune masters have said ever since, “the person makes the rune.” Whoever is strong and pure of heart can bear the power of the high runes without being consumed by it. It is possible. Kaelen proved it.

Yet Kaelen’s greatest work was in the end neither a rune nor a battle. On his long roads he had dug with Dwarves in the deep and sat at the fires of the Elves, and he recognised what before him no one wished to say aloud: each of the three peoples guarded only a part of the old knowledge. The Dwarves understood the binding of signs into rock and iron, the Elves preserved the writings and songs of the first scholars, and the Humans carried the courage to seek what was lost. Divided, Kaelen saw, they would never truly comprehend the runes. And so he accomplished what no king had managed: he called the wise of all three peoples to one table, so that they might share their knowledge, secure the teachings of the old masters, and watch over the signs together. Out of those gatherings, the chroniclers say, grew the bond that stands to this day, the bond that brought Dwarves and Elves into the Council of Valandor. What Kaelen began outlasted him.

For a high rune demands to be fed with energy without pause, or it burns down, and to keep five of them alive at once was always held to be impossible. Yet Kaelen came closer to that impossibility than any mortal before him. All his life he learned to feed and to master the signs, and the few who still saw him in his last years reported something strange: his five runes shone brighter than ever, as though they had ceased to burn against him and begun to burn for him.

His end, however, is the greatest riddle of Averrunes. For Kaelen the Steadfast did not die. He vanished. One evening he still sat with his companions at the fire, spoke calmly as always, and wished them a good night. By morning he was gone. No trail led out of the camp, no word of farewell remained, and with him vanished his sword, his shield and his chain with the five signs. They searched for him for years, in every realm, on every road. He was never seen again. To this day no one can explain what happened that night. Only one thing the old writings whisper: that on the evening before, his five runes are said to have shone all at once in full power for the first time. Somewhere they must still exist, the five signs of the Rune Knight. And whoever finds them, the rune masters believe, finds more than five runes: they find the answer to where Kaelen has gone.

The Hunt for the Sixth Rune

When the Rune Knight vanished, the world held its breath. The three peoples mourned their greatest hero; songs were sung, monuments raised. But away from the mourning, in studies and back rooms, a few asked a question that would not let them go: what if Kaelen had not died at all? What if, at the end of his road, he had found something greater than anything the world knew? Whoever uncovered that secret, they believed, would open a door that had been shut since the fall of Averan.

Out of that hunger arose the Order of the Silent Hand: a sworn brotherhood of scholars, thieves and fallen priests who knew one another by a wordless greeting, the open hand that no speech accompanies. They served no king and no council. Their only law was the search: to follow Kaelen’s path, to gather shard upon shard, and to complete what the Rune Knight, so they believed, had completed before them.

For decades the Order worked in secret, patient as water. Wherever a shard surfaced, the Silent Hand surfaced shortly after: as merchants who paid too much, as pilgrims who asked questions that were too precise. They opened the graves of the old masters, bought entire libraries empty and disappeared with the knowledge of the realms. And whoever stood in their way was neither threatened nor fought. They were forgotten: their name vanished from the writings, their trace from the world.

Yet the closer the Order came to its goal, the more clearly it felt that it was not searching alone. Twice the brothers believed they had found Kaelen’s trail, and twice it led into emptiness, laid by someone who wanted them to go the wrong way. Someone knew every one of their steps before they took it. In the last records of the Order there is one sentence, again and again, written in different hands, as though the brothers had passed it on to one another like a warning: “The sixth rune is not lost. It hides because it wants to be found, but not by us.”

Where the Order is today, no one knows. Their refuges stand empty, their writings are sealed. Yet in the kingdoms travellers still appear who ask too many questions about a crater where a tree once stood. And whoever asks after them is answered quietly, and reluctantly.

Some, though, whisper darker things: that the Order never vanished but only changed its robes. That the Silent Hand has stopped searching and started waiting. And that some of its brothers today sit where one would least suspect them: among those who are meant to watch over the runes. It is only a rumour. But there are men in the Watchtower of Valandor who sleep badly at night, because they have heard it.

The Last Rune Master

On the night Averan fell, six rune masters died. So it stands in every chronicle. Yet there is a story that no chronicle tells, only the old innkeepers by the roadside, when the fire has burned low and the guest has paid enough: that one of the six survived.

They call him the Ash-Grey One. A man without age who has wandered through the ages since the fall, never staying long in one place. He is known, they say, by his eyes, pale as smoke, and by the fact that runes begin to whisper in his presence. He seeks nothing. He sells nothing. He warns.

For the Ash-Grey One knows what truly awoke that night beneath the roots of Averan, and he has a single charge: to prevent the five high runes from ever being united again and the sixth sign from awakening. It is said that he ended the First Rune War: that the sword-bearer who cut the runes from Aldric Corveth’s flesh was no boy at all, but the Ash-Grey One in another shape. It is said that it was he who twice laid false runes for the Order of the Silent Hand, to lure them away from the truth.

Whoever meets him is always asked the same question: “Do you bear a rune?” What happens next depends entirely on the answer. Some tell that he saved their lives. The others never came back.

So the circle of the old world closes and the new one begins. Five high runes are out there somewhere, scattered across ruins and kingdoms. The sixth hides and waits. An ancient watcher sleeps beneath a crater that no one dares to enter. And a grey wanderer goes from fire to fire and asks his one question. The story of Averrunes has not been told to its end. It has only just begun.

The Just King

Let us remember: Vardann, the mightiest kingdom of the Humans, a land of wide fields, proud cities and diligent hands, where craft counts for more than nobility does elsewhere. It was this realm in which a miner once found the Rune of Strength and in which the First Rune War began. No land has suffered more under the high runes, and none has learned its lesson more thoroughly. Where other rulers coveted the signs, Vardann did the opposite: it learned to fear them without hating them. And it found a king who turned that fear into wisdom.

This king bore the name Theron, and the chroniclers call him the Keeper to this day. When in his youth two princes began to hoard high runes and arm their hosts, Theron did not ride to battle. He invited them both to one table, shared his own bread with them, and spoke for three days and three nights, until a looming second rune war had become an alliance. Not one sword was drawn. It is said that this was his greatest victory: one of which no song tells, because no one died. The two princes were no small men: one lord of the coastal lands in the west, whose people live on ships and whose harbours carry the trade of half the world; the other keeper of the stern priestly realm in the east, where the runes are revered not as tools but as holy things. What Theron promised them in those three nights he never wrote down. Yet some whisper to this day that this unwritten promise still binds Vardann.

Theron reigned long and kindly, and at his side stood Queen Aurelia, whose mildness often turned the hardness of the law into mercy. He built roads into the farthest border provinces, had the royal granaries opened in years of hunger, and established the Council of Keepers: a circle in which all three peoples are represented: Humans, Dwarves and Elves, entirely in the spirit of the bond the Rune Knight once founded. The Council watched wherever runes appeared in the realm and saw to it that never again did too much power gather in one hand. His people loved him as a king is seldom loved.

The Royal City of Valandor

The heart of Vardann is Valandor: a city of bright stone, built upon a mountain that towers above the valley, so that its spires can be seen shimmering in the light a full day’s ride away. Its name is old and comes from the language of the first scholars; it means, they say, “the watching place”. And watchful it is: in the highest stronghold, the Watchtower, the Council of Keepers has sat since Theron’s days and guards what is known of the runes of the old world.

Valandor is no fortress of fear, but a city of balance. In its lower quarters markets, guildhalls and the great libraries crowd together, where rune masters research alongside the scholars of the Council, not in secret, but side by side. And although a Human wears the crown, Valandor does not rule alone: Dwarves and Elves also sit on the Council of Keepers, and no decision of weight is made without their voices. Whoever sends word from the borderlands to the capital means this city. And whoever has once stood before the Watchtower understands why people say: as long as Valandor watches, the crater in the north sleeps quietly.

The Young King

When Theron died, old and peaceful in his bed, many feared that peace would die with him. But his son Leoric carried the inheritance onward, and some say he carries it more wisely still. Young, generous and of calm mind, King Leoric does not keep the rune masters of his realm in chains, but close: he lets them research, though under the eyes of the Council, and would rather share knowledge than forbid it.

More than that: Leoric founded in Valandor the School of the Rune Masters, so that the old art of the signs should no longer be guarded by individuals but taught and passed on. Whoever brings the talent and the patience can learn the rune craft there. And he did it in a realm that has always held craft in high regard: in Vardann little counts for as much as a skilled hand. Smiths, tailors, alchemists and craftspeople of every kind enjoy the standing that elsewhere only knights receive, and their workshops and guildhalls fill whole quarters of Valandor.

At his side reigns Queen Elara, and among the people it is said that in her Vardann has found its second kind heart. Come from a noble but not powerful house, she knows the life of ordinary folk better than many a councillor; it is her work that Valandor opens its libraries and houses of healing to the poorest as well. Leoric and Elara have two children: Aren, the heir to the throne, a serious boy who asks too much and listens too closely, and Amalia, his younger sister, fearless and quick, who would rather slip away to the guards on the walls than sit in the lessons of the court tutors. In them, the realm hopes, Theron’s legacy lives on.

For Leoric knows what his father entrusted to him on his deathbed: that the runes do not vanish merely because one avoids them. That somewhere in the north a crater gapes in the earth. And that it is wiser to have the masters of the runes at one’s side when the day comes on which the old power awakens. One last thing Theron gave his son on his way: that unwritten promise from the three nights of his youth. What it consists of, only King Leoric knows today. Under his rule Vardann flourishes in a peace too fair to last for ever. And at its edges, in the quiet borderlands, something is already beginning to stir.

Greenvale

In the south of King Leoric’s realm lies Greenvale, and whoever first sees it from the hills understands why people say: here life awakens. A fertile plain spreads out as far as the eye can reach, threaded with brooks and edged by old forests. In the fields the farmers grow herbs and vegetables that thrive nowhere else in the realm, and the air carries the scent of fresh earth and flowering meadows. It is a valley that makes you happy when you wander through its wide spaces. Here you come. Perhaps as a scout of the Council, perhaps as a fortune seeker, perhaps because the valley called you without your knowing it.

Your road begins at the South Camp, a small outpost by the wayside: a few tents, a fire, a trader who sells everything a traveller needs, and a letter box through which word reaches all the way to Valandor. At the edge of the camp stands a Shrine of Return in the old graveyard: a runestone as old as the valley itself, which calls the souls of the fallen back into life. No one remembers any more who raised it. It simply does what it does, as long as anyone can remember.

Not far from the camp lies a small village of farmers and scholars: farmsteads, a well, a few armed folk, and in the middle of it the study of an old scribe who knows more about the valley than he admits. From here come the first tasks entrusted to a newcomer.

The first dangers are small: stray game, hungry wolves, a boar that comes too close to the camp. Yet the settlers say the valley has grown restless. On the roads to the north highwaymen are about, and many a traveller has arrived poorer than they set out. For someone who is only beginning, that is exactly the right size of trouble.

But the true secret of Greenvale lies beneath the earth. In the hills at the valley’s edge opens the shaft of an old, long abandoned mine: dark, winding and inhabited by creatures that shun the light. Deep inside it, so the old scribe murmurs, rests the first rune a traveller can win for themselves: the beginning of their own road with the signs. But no one conquers the mine alone. Whoever would recover the rune needs companions at their side. That is the first great lesson of Averrunes: the most precious treasures are not fetched alone.

Greenvale is the beginning. Here you learn to hold your ground. But the valley is only the threshold. Beyond the meadows, where the land rises towards the mountain, your first real test waits in Lindau.

Lindau

Follow the valley northwards and Lindau opens before you, the fairest water meadow of the borderlands, named after the old lime trees in whose shade the settlers dance on summer evenings. Above it rises the mountain, on whose summit the towers of Valandor shimmer in the light. It is a friendly place, with farmsteads, orchards and a brook that draws its glittering line through the grass.

Yet lately the cheerfulness has grown quieter. A band of highwaymen, people call them the Hawks, has nested in the old ruins at the forest’s edge and makes the road up to the royal city unsafe. They rob traders, drive off cattle and demand from the farms a “road toll” that no one owes them. In the evenings the farmers bolt their doors, and whoever wants to reach Valandor travels only in company. But whoever looks more closely notices something odd: strikingly often the Hawks fall upon precisely those wagons that carry ore and old tools down from the mine of Greenvale, as though they were searching in them for something particular. Or as though someone paid them who knows exactly for what.

To this come wolves that descend from the forests of the mountain, bolder than in earlier years, and more than one herdsman has already lost an animal. None of this is some great, dark doom. It is the kind of unrest that arises when a stretch of land is forgotten for too long. And it is exactly here that a newcomer can make a name: by standing with the farms, driving off the Hawks and clearing the road that leads up to Valandor.

Lindau too has its village, larger than the one in Greenvale, with a small hall where farmers and scholars come together. And like Greenvale, the land hides a secret in its depth: inside the mountain lie the halls of an old Dwarven city, with streets of stone, silent machines and shafts that no one fully knows any more. Yet whoever enters them soon grasps something disquieting: this city was not abandoned. It was sealed. Gates closed in great haste, warding runes struck half finished into the rock, tools left lying in the middle of the work. The Dwarves of today, who have long lived in their own royal city in the mountains, do not speak of what their forefathers saw down here. Only one old Dwarven saying has survived: “Some gates are not bolted against what is outside.” Whoever descends into that depth widens their knowledge of the runes, for no people ever understood as the Dwarves did how to bind signs into stone and ore. But here too no road leads for a single person; only with tested companions does one return from the sealed halls.

The Climb to Valandor

Beyond Lindau the path begins to rise. It winds up the mountain, past old watchtowers and weathered shrines, until the road bends one last time and the gates of Valandor rise before you: the royal city you have known until now only as a distant shimmer above the meadows.

Up here the world is a different one. Where the roads below have grown unsafe, here bells ring, markets sound and scholars speak. Behind the walls wait the Council of Keepers, the great libraries and the Watchtower, in which King Leoric guards his father’s inheritance. Here a traveller also learns a craft: at the School of the Rune Masters the art of the runes, or in the guildhalls the smithing, the tailoring, the alchemy and the many other arts on which Vardann lives. For the traveller, Valandor is refuge and beginning at once: the place where roads cross and greater tasks start.

And whoever looks down from the wall upon Lindau and the wide borderlands notices how quiet it has become at the edges of the realm. King Leoric’s peace holds, for now. Yet the roads are no longer as safe as in Theron’s days, and one or two on the Council of Keepers ask themselves quietly whether behind the small unrest of the borderlands there might not be something larger after all. Your story, traveller, begins with small things. Where it leads has yet to be decided.

Here ends what I am able to write down. Not because the story is over, but because it has caught up with me.

In these last moons, things have been piling up that I cannot explain to myself. For the first time in generations, shards are being found again: a farmer ploughs one out of his field, a fisherman draws a glowing stone from the brook, a child brings me a fragment that turns warm at night. The signs that kept silent for centuries are beginning to speak again. And with them the small oddities of our valley: the shrine that glows on certain nights, the wolves growing bolder, the Hawks who of all the wagons attack precisely those carrying the ore from the old mine. Taken singly, none of it means anything. Taken together, it forms a sentence that I can so far read only half of. And the half I can read, I do not like.

Then, a few days ago, a carter rested at my door. He spoke of a grey man who stood by the road to Greenvale, with eyes pale as smoke, and who asked him a single question. All my life I have written about the Ash-Grey One, and secretly I never believed that he existed. Now he is here, in my valley. And if the old stories teach one thing, it is this: the grey wanderer does not appear without reason.

And finally there is the thing I will not yet write about. On the night the carter travelled on, I saw among his wares something that did not belong there. I took it, and I have hardly slept since. What it is and what it means, I do not entrust to these pages. Not yet. It would be irresponsible while I do not know whether what I fear is true. And so I shall do what an old man with stiff bones had better leave alone: I shall set out myself and follow the matter. This chronicle I leave behind, so that it may be found.

Should you, traveller, hold this book in your hands while my chair stands empty, then I ask three things of you. Follow the signs. Gather what you find, and join together what belongs together. And trust no one who asks too kindly after the shards. The story of Averrunes will be written on, with me or without me. Perhaps it is your name that stands in the next chapter.