I have paced these forests for so long I don＇t know if I am man or I am beast.

I, though, hold deep within me a quest for revenge.

Then I must be a man as much as I can be.

I have learned to speak the tongue of the animal

I have learned to read the signs in bark and snow.

I have taken within myself the spirits of my fathers,

long time gone.

In this short time, far from home, a man of Iron I＇ve grown.

A man of Iron I have grown.

A part of the Eternal Woods...

Late evening...

＂Just after sunset on his way back to his camp after watching the sun unite

with the mountains in the west, he sees the flickering of light between the

tree trunks. Approaching, he sees an old man sitting calmly by a fire, as

if waiting for him. His left eye missing. His beard as if gold. The signs

on his cloak and hood familiar. The one eyed old man matches the

description of the soothsayer, as told by the elders of his village by the

fires at night when he only a child. The boy, now a young man, eager to

know, asks the one eyed old man about his dreams. Dreams he cannot

understand. Dreams about strange things he is seeing himself doing. Then

the winds that seem to talk to him. Voices that whisper to him behind his

back. The one eyed old man tells him of the cycles of the stars, of the

trail of fate and of the valley where time and space had ceased to exist...

where his world ends and the shadows begin. The one eyed old man tells the

young man that fate has chosen him to interfere with the other world. The

disturbance is already made. The daughters of the four winds have sold

themselves to the shadows, distorting the balance of the universe. And the

one eyed old man says he has seen him come for a thousand years, and that

the aging gods have told him to teach him all that he has ever known and to

prepare him to ride beyond his world and into the shadows as their champion

to restore the balance. To his aid he shall be given a sword forged when

this world was young. He shall be guarded and guided by two ravens, and he

shall ride the eight-legged stallion of his fathers＇ god. He will encounter

the Woodwoman, and he will make a visit to the Lake. One hundred days and

one hundred nights his training shall be hard. And this very night it will

already have begun.

And thus he had met the One Eyed old Man...＂