Thrice has mankind come within a hair’s breadth of grasping the will of the unseen world, only to expire at the peak of its vanity when the knowledge of that world may have pulled it back from the chasm’s maw.
Three times have ripened souls been called and too few answered. Poverty of love and faith pulled them down from the lofty realms that they glimpsed, that they longed forever to return to. But the Divine, with endless patience, sees fruit borne from out of the rot of man’s despair. Ceaselessly whispering it promise, awaiting ears to hear it. And so there arise new ages and rekindled hope.
Locked within the dungeons of Sere, young Garen had as much as any man’s allotted time in which to listen, but too often what he heard was the voice of the Adversary (which he mistook for his own most intimate thoughts) telling him that the prison was all that there was and all that he would ever know. Long years spent in a dim nook of hollowed gut rock had made the dank air, feeble light, and cold echoes so familiar as to become almost pleasurable, as capitulation may be a form of pleasure.
What foul circumstance had divorced him from the world, until loneliness and disuse atrophied his body and heart? He’d been a debtor; and, worse still, one who’d dared to speak ill of his heir-less King (a man whom few dared even speak of at all).
There in the King’s prison, Garen’s rage had tumbled over itself until, after agonizingly slow years, it’d been utterly spent.
In this place of austere solitude, God’s Adversary came to placate Garen’s suffering with it’s fork-tongued perversions of Truth.
“Your brothers and sisters who dwell out beyond these walls are no freer than you are in truth. All manner of living in this world is just one form of imprisonment or another. What does it matter how one weathers the storms of life? It is a brief dream, bitter or sweet, and soon all will languish in the dust and find eternal sleep.”
Most of Garen’s nights were spent with naught but this voice for companionship.
And so life may have transpired until he did, indeed, languish in the dust of his cell. But other forces were at work in his world. It came to pass that the King (whom none loved, though few would speak what was in their hearts) grew deathly ill with an affliction no physician could name, a disease that sapped his body of vigor and stripped his mind of reason. His mother the Queen, who had hitherto been ruler in all but name, was now authority over the realm in truth. Not long after her coronation she sent for Garen; she ordered that he be bathed and fitted in courtly clothes and then brought before her.
Before the unfolding drama is recounted, it should be mentioned that Garen had never before known the love and passion of a woman. Freedom had been robbed from him before he could fulfill his dream of marrying his childhood sweetheart. It was naiveté, then, that caused him to mistake the hungry look in the queen’s eyes, to assume that she’d brought him in front of the richly-attired court to mock him. So he met the curious regard of the courtiers and servants with all the insolence he could muster; and for three hours he endured a humiliating public interview, during which time his crimes and past history were dissected in excruciating detail. Then the Queen said a remarkable thing.
“I am aware that the folk of the realm have long believed that the Royal Body cares not for their sufferings and lack.” She gazed down at Garen with a look that he mistook for sympathy; and she spoke in a disarming way that had yet a sultry undertone, as a woman to a man. “I know now, also, that it has fallen upon me to redress the lack of compassion, the arrogance, in my son. Do you not see, dear Garen, that if I pardon you - and take you to be my husband and King - to share my bed and the stewardship of the realm, that our subjects will then know that the scales are fair and all are equal and freeborn under the sun?”
Hearing this, Garen gaped; and his throat went dry. The Queen was old enough to be his own mother; but for a man who had known not even a heated kiss or embrace in twenty-eight years, she appeared like a spring blossom. He stammered and blushed. He gazed at her ebony curls, her full lips, the milky-white bosom visible from the cut of her embroidered gown; and, having no will to say yea or nay, he teetered where he stood until the queen proclaimed that it must be so.
And it came to pass that Garen was crowned King after taking Indis the Queen for his wife. All the fealty accorded to a ruler of the land was his. And if common folk murmured that the present King was no more honorable than the former, rumor of this never reached his sheltered ears.
The Adversary was well pleased with the whole arrangement, and as a snaky advisor will switch positions as the tide of collective feeling shifts, so It now abandoned the doom-laden rhetoric with which it had counseled Garen in his cell. Now (it whispered) life could be bountiful and sweet. Garen had only to please his Queen, to endeavor always to prove himself worthy of her love and regard, and all the delights of earthly life could be his.
So Garen was reminded of this when he balked at the notion of dressing as the Queen bade him, or of entreating visiting dignitaries with her crafted words; or when she compensated for the gaps in his knowledge of statecraft instead of educating him; when he wondered what real power was accorded the King. He would simply recall his years in his cell and be contented.
Neither did he notice the lusty glances that passed between Queen Indis and her Captain of the Guard, or think overmuch about the long private audiences the two held together. Nor did he see the way the Captain stared after him - evincing none of the loyalty owed a King but rather the rivalry in a man who desire's another's woman.
So often it happens in times of war that those who partake in its atrocities will wonder if theirs is the cause worth fighting for. When the realm was beset with rebellion in the third year of his reign, this proved true for Garen - though some time would pass before he could see this with clarity. It was he who gave the orders for the army of the realm to stamp out an uprising of out land tribes. He saw this deed accomplished; and, much to the Queen's satisfaction, the leader of the rebellion was captured and brought into the capital to face justice.
Popular sentiment cried aloud for the death of this man, but Garen, moved by a mixture of vanity and unfamiliar sympathy, said: "Could we not make an example of him, and keep him caged here in the courtyard so that all may see what happens to those who defy us?"
"If it pleases your Highness," said the Queen, with an ambiguous smile.
So the dark Chieftain (whose name none could glean, even from rumor) was set in the city's square where he could do naught but crouch within a frame of thick steel. Commoners came to jeer, to hurl rotten vegetables and stones, and mock him, until they tired of the game. Garen, impelled by an impulse that was foreign to him, decided to see the daunting Chief himself. He set out one evening when there were no others about.
"Why did you command your savages to attack the city?" he demanded, though his voice quavered beneath his self-control.
As the man looked up, Garen drew back with a start. His eyes, his demeanor, was not likened unto one who acknowledged imprisonment or even defeat.
"To get your attention," he said simply.
When words and reason failed Garen then, the stranger went on. "These bars cannot hold me, though you cannot understand this. I appear thus to show you that YOU are jailed, still. For you to know the truth of this, you would have to free me - aye, of your own volition."
Between instants, Garen's fear was subsumed beneath the weight of his pampered pride.
"That's ridiculous!" he spat.
"Is it?" The man challenged him. "Tell me, then: do you want to know why the keys to my cage were not entrusted to the Bailiff but were instead given into your Queen's own keeping? It is not the tribes she fears - not all of them united could storm Sere, even if they wished to. No, what she fears in her secret heart is that you may follow me and forget her forever."
By now Garen was fuming with - and blinded by - indignation. Waving a finger, he pronounced, "I will prove you, this night, a liar. And then I will forget the mercy that moved me to choose imprisonment for you over death."
The man shrugged. "I can only await your decision, as this is your moment of choice. But if you go to your chambers now to test my word, your pain will met you there."
Garen was already moving, fueled by a King's pride, through the courtyard and then up the broad steps of the citadel. The Queen believed him out on an errand; she would not expect him back so soon, but for once he cared not whether he displeased her. Crossing the anteroom to the royal chambers, he did not hear the warning cries of his advisor, nor see the scandalized looks on the faces of maids who scurried from his path. Rage was pounding in his temples. He pushed open the heavy double doors and witnessed a scene that froze his blood.
Queen Indis was straightening her gown; her guard Captain Edrick was trying to put distance between the two of them...with their flushed faces, clothes in disarray, and eyes dripping guilt, there was no mistaking what they'd been about.
"Milord..." both began at once.
Then their silence condemned them surely. Garen stood shaking, his fists clenched, gazing between the two of them as they suddenly grew monstrous before his eyes. Then, galvanized by the shock of betrayal, he strode to the Queen's dresser and threw open its doors.
"My Lord," she began again, composing herself in the manner of a Matriarch, "I see that you are pained, but you must understand that it is not without precedent for her Highness to choose other lovers. It does not compromise..."
"I will know what else you have hidden from me!" Garen raved. "What other treachery and dark secrets!" He was casting aside garments, dashing jewelry onto the marble floor. "Ahh!" He held aloft a small wooden box, triumph alighting on his face. Fishing through it, he grasped the key to the iron cage.
Then he was out of the chamber, running with hunched gait like an invalid and clutching the skeleton key as if it was a rare treasure.
"His freedom is on your head now, woman!" He screamed. He was blind to the reactions, all around, to his clamor.
He was babbling as he reached the cage in the courtyard. "It was just as you said! And the queen has been faithless; she has made a mockery of me before my people, and even now she does not repent..."
"Hurry," the dark man urged him. "She will have the guard upon us in moments."
Garen nodded and set about his task. It did not occur to him to question whether or not he trusted the stranger. He knew only that the thought of flight seemed suddenly comforting. In a moment the cage door was open and the Chief stood beside him, giving Garen an appraising look.
"You will not be able to outrun them," he said. "Climb onto my back."
What happened next would linger on in Garen's memories like fragments of a dream. He began to protest, but the sounds of the castle awakening in alarm shook indecision from him like dust off of a garment. He clambered onto the Chief and soon felt like, far from a man, he'd mounted a giant gazelle. He clung for dear life to that thick corded neck as they flew through the court and outer gate and then over the keep's moat in a series of monstrous bounds. The two devoured more distance over air than ground. Garen, his mind reeling with the impossibility of it all, gathered himself to cry:
"Must I die without knowing aught of you, even your name?"
"Until you come to know me better," the stranger responded, "call me Shadow."
Then they were upon the grasslands beyond Sere, chasing the cool vestige of the setting sun.
"But where are you taking me, Shadow?" Garen asked, still clinging to the Chieftain's back.
"We will pass over Gran Hill and into the forest beyond," the man said.
Garen's voice emerged veritably a whisper. "You must not, I beg you! The forbidden wood? Death would be preferable to..."
"We will be safe there, for the same reason that you fear it," the man said. "None of your people will dare follow us while their superstitions constrain them."
It was all too much. Garen peered up at the stark outline of Gran Hill; he thought of the ominous forest that it guarded, a place that had haunted his dreams since childhood, and he swooned.
"Awake, lad. There is something you must see."
In spite of all the madness of the previous evening, the crumbling of the world that he'd known (and he was still half hoping it'd all been a dream), Garen was still possessed of enough self-importance to awaken and jump to his feet with a huff of indignation.
"What is this? you dare to address your King as 'lad'?"
Shadow gave a cavernous belly laugh. "Today we find out what the 'King' is really made of. Come!"
It should be remarked upon here that people are wont to use many significant events as guideposts along the passage of their lives. Some will think back to a wedding, or the birth of a child, and recall at once the age that they were and the particular flavor of their life at that time. For Garen, this day would forevermore be remembered as the turning point of his life's journey. It was the moment when he discovered - on a visceral level that his mind could not refute - that his cherished image of himself was false, that he'd been living thus far as a hollow man within a house of cards.
Shadow led him to a small clearing in the forbidden wood where the ground opened upon a deep well. When Garen gazed upon it he could not guess its depth or whether it even had a bottom at all. Some aspect of the crystalline waters provoked in him an aching thirst.
"The Well reveals to a man naught but what lives inside of him," Shadow said. "Have a look, Garen."
And the young man did. He stepped closer and peered down...then, for a moment, he felt disappointment. There was nothing but his simple reflection, the wrinkles of his white tunic, the cuffs of which he'd rolled up during last night's flight - but wait. He squinted and looked closer. There was no face. All around the area where the pool reflected his head he could make out only a haze of dirty white. He might have explained it as a trick of the light; but what disturbed him in that moment was the familiarity of the image.
"You see no face because you have none," Shadow pronounced, as if reading his mind. "This is the depth to which you are known to yourself. Your identity has been dictated by the whims of the world since you were old enough to speak. Your years of anger, of making peace with your prison, your play-acting as King and pursuing fleshy joys with your Queen - what have any of these experiences ever taught you about the true nature of Garen?"
The young man continued to stare, and the truth engulfed him with all of its attendant grief. "Then I am better off a dead man," he murmured. Those were the Adversary's words, though he believed they were his own.
"Are you so willing to relinquish your life when everything real is just beginning?" The dark man shook his head. "It would be better were you to return to the Well when you are ready to look deeper."
Garen, sickened by the weight of his unlived life, slumped to the ground and lay his head in his hands.
For every man or woman who catches a glimpse of the real Truth beneath the lies - as Garen finally did - there are thousands whose whole lives pass them by without their ever realizing that such a thing is possible. But before we see Garen's particular epiphany, it must be explained how the Adversary fought with every vicious resources at Its disposal to keep him from ever reaching such a place.
Oh, it had a hundred arguments - all of them persuasive and resembling truth. What, after all, could be better than a King's life in the castle? Certainly a man who held the power of life or death over his subjects was not a FACELESS MAN. And the queen would surely take Garen back. They could forgive one another and resume their happy lives. Edrick could be pardoned or punished as the King saw fit.
And what had this strange man who called himself Shadow ever really done to help Garen.? What makes you think you can trust him at all?
"Is this your revenge upon me, then?" Garen yelled at Shadow one morning - unprovoked by anything but his own bereavement (and the Voice). "I argued to spare your life, and you repay me with humiliation! Using witchery to convince the King that he is weak!"
Shadow held out his hands, palms up. "If you want to return to the life you left than do so. I've done nothing to constrain you. Tell your queen that I bewitched you, and all will be forgiven."
Oftentimes it happens that the angry man, denied the fight that he aches for, finds his ire dissipating like dew beneath the sun. Garen was left with naught but his confusion.
"Well, he stammered, "I suppose I have no other choice. What else is there for me, but to wander these woods like a beast and waste each morning looking in your accursed pool? He may have meant this in the spirit of defiance. But Shadow heard the genuine question: What else is there for me?
"There is one thing you have not tried," he told Garen. "You have not taken the whole of your grief, all the pain of wasting the prime of your manhood inside a prison and selling yourself to a woman for a castle of sand, all the loss you've carried buried beneath the pride of victim and ruler, and brought it with you to the water. For two reasons have you not done this: because it hurts and galls you, and because you are convinced that there is nothing of real worth in you to begin with."
At this moment Garen wept - he knew not why - and cried: "Who are you, to have such seeming faith in me when I have none myself?"
To which the man only nodded and replied, "Now is the time. Go to the Deep Well."
Garen lumbered like a man dying of thirst. he collapsed near the pool's edge, fists clenching dirt and eyes inches from the water. There he saw his face as he remembered it from his palace mirrors, though it was wet now with tears and contorted in grief. He flinched from the image at first, until his heart softened towards it.
Then the picture began to swirl, as if the Well had been disturbed in its nebulous depths. His face vanished, and then was replaced by a new image: distant light like reflected sunset. As Garen squinted the light gained definition, form. There before him was a young boy, scarcely pubescent, all aglow and adorned in pure white save for a band of gold circling his forehead. But all his beauty and symmetry of form was yet trifling beside the light of boundless love, joy and abandon that shone in his eyes - and shone, in that moment, for Garen alone.
"What, by God...but he is precious! Who..?"
"Someone I hope you will come to know very well," he heard Shadow saying.
The Garen felt the man's warm hand on his shoulder, and he sighed despite himself. "But, who is he?"
Shadow's laughter sounded like the first piping notes of spring. "Do you have to ask, when truly you knew it from the first moment? My dear man, that beautiful and - I must say - infinitely patient boy there is the true heart of you!"