The Wanderer Abroad

[avevale_intelligencer]

It is not easy, especially at the time of which we write, to make one's way from England to Central Europe without at any point passing through France; it is, however, possible, by the exercise of one's wits and the expenditure of certain monies, and thus it was that, on a brisk April morning, a thin, dark-haired man alighted from a train at a small station girt on three sides by mountains whose snowy caps came almost halfway down their vertiginous sides, consulted a much-folded piece of paper, took a sighting from the position of the sun and set off down what was, after all, the only road towards the small village to which the station belonged, picking his way carefully along the rough, grass-sprinkled track.

In thus avoiding passage through France, this man was in no way motivated by fear for his safety. The country was restored to order after its recent turmoil, and travellers passed freely across its borders in all directions. It was another kind of fear altogether that guided his footsteps so circuitously. Had he set foot in France, he would have felt bound by a promise made some time previously to go by way of Paris: had he found himself in Paris, that same promise would have guided him to a certain house in the fashionable quarter: and had he come to that house, he would without fail have encountered a person to whom he must needs have explained the errand that had brought him to leave his native shores. That explanation, and the reaction that might have followed it, were the source of the terror that drove him so far out of his way. Men are prone to such fears, groundless as they might in reality be.

At length he came into the village, perched on the side of its hill like a billycock hat on the head of a Londoner on pleasure bent, and paused at an inn whose aged inhabitants eyed him with the wary incuriousness of the goats who wandered the fields above. He entered the dim coolness of the tavern and spoke at some length with the sandy-bearded man behind the bar: some coins changed hands, and the innkeeper ventured out of the door to point the traveller's way further down into the shaded valley that wound between the hills. The thin man thanked him courteously and went on his way, while the innkeeper gazed after him and shook his head sadly.

Master Elias Shadman was fulfilling his Doom.

Comments

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Damn, something else that I'm going to have to keep reading.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

>:D

[alyramoondancer.livejournal.com]

Hooray! It goes on! *claps hands*