Janus sat on the rock by the entrance to The Grove as he had sat for many days and nights. He had come here the moment the voice went silent. He remembered that day like some horrible dream he had been unable to wake up from. Most of his life the voice had been with him. He heard the sounds and songs of The Grove and it’s children. He knew the voice of lark and cricket, of maple and birch, of boar and beetle. They were silent now, as was Goentryx his master and the Arch-Druid of The West. The nightmare of this silence and absence was enhanced by the fact that Janus was barred from entry into The Grove.

He had tried to enter when he first arrived. The branches and boughs had bent to block his path. Grasses grew and wrapped together to form impenetrable walls of flora. Jaydn, the cougar, paced and prowled behind the living walls. She growled at Janus’ mere presence. Janus felt fear for the first time. He felt a fear that very few mortals had ever felt. His was a fear of the very fabric of reality that held Dryg-Gwra together. That was the first night he had the dream.

Janus stood on the ridge as he looked out across the plain. He heard the wails from above and looked to the sky. He saw the darkness on the horizon to the east. He spun around again and again, only to see dark clouds to the north, south, and west. He watched in horror as the clouds began to draw closer to the plain. They blanketed the sky with a sickly purple hue as they closed in on the plain and blotted out any sign of the stars above. Janus felt his heart race with fear as he stared up into the roiling mass. His gaze was torn back to the plain below by the screams he heard from down there. Suddenly, he found himself standing in the center of the plain. He was surrounded by the dead and the dying. He saw the nations of Men all around him. There were men from Derugar, Nordren, Sundarya, and Northreach. Their bloated corpses stared at him with open-eyed faces. He also saw the corpses of Choshu that bore the same expression.

Janus wanted to scream, but no sound would escape his lips. He wanted to run, but his feet were held fast by the earth itself. He stared in horror as he watched the corpses start to rise and move.

It was then that he awoke. It was then that he screamed. That same dream haunted him each of the last seven nights. Janus was exhausted, and felt alone.

Tob ap Huwyll hand wandered through the woods of Keshorn since the fall of Lud. It was not the war that haunted him. He had seen many battles. It was not the deaths that had haunted him, for he had caused and seen many of those. It was the face of the Thane’s daughter and the sound of her screams as the Ogre had carried her off into the woods.

For seven days and six nights he had tracked the Ogre. On the seventh night he had found him. He was alone now, the girl having already passed from the wound caused by Tob’s errant arrow. The beast didn’t live to see an eighth day after the fall of Lud. Tob had attacked the ogre with a ferocity that the young ranger never knew existed. The beast was dead a full minute before Tob had stopped hacking into the corpse. Exhausted, hungry, and lost in himself, Tob ap Huwyll fell to his knees and cried. He didn’t know where to go or what to do. He was alone and without hope. Home, he thought to himself. I need to go home.

Tob picked himself up and left for the woods outside Caer Derugar, to the grove of his childhood friend Janus of Beldrem, to the memories of days brighter and filled with a young boy’s hope. He walked quietly through the forests of Derugar to ensure none would see him. He finally stepped into the clearing near the great rock and saw a figure sitting on the rock.

"It's good of you to wait for me here, brother," Tob said, with the deep understatement that characterized his people. He was as grateful as he could be to find him there, to find Janus at all. While they were not brothers, or even clansmen, Tob held Janus as closely as a brother, and in calling him such used an honorific reserved almost exclusively for fellow clansmen. He regarded his oldest friend with weary eyes, and saw in Janus an unease of spirit that was unmistakable and reflected loss, and bewilderment. They were feelings he had grown familiar with in the past weeks. He waited, for Janus's response, for his reaction. It was not the event of leaping and shouting and spontaneous dancing that he had imagined. Things were not right at home, either, apparently.

Janus started at the sudden burst of voice behind him. Nothing had ever startled him so close to the Grove for many years. He recognized the voice, and lifted his chin off chest, half turning to look at his one true friend through eyes framed in dark circles.

"Tob......"

Janus had no words, he wanted to run, to scream, to weep. Instead, he sat there on that rock paralyzed by exhaustion, and emotion. He searched hard inside himself, trying to push aside the awful solitary misery of his exile from the Grove. He smiled, genuine, if forced.....

"Thank Beldrem for you, my Brother. I am lost, and alone in the dark."

"What ... " Tob was flummoxed. This was not what he was expecting. Janus was clearly not blind, but his words didn't make any sense any other way, either. "Not alone anymore, thank Beldrem and Varengaard. And if you are lost, then I am lost with you. What has you so low?" He ambled easily up onto the large rock, on which he had spent many nights asking for guidance, protection, and advice from his own stars. The rock was a spot where one could wait for entry to the woods if Janus or Goentryx was needed to gain entry. Here was Janus, essentially sitting on his own threshhold. "What has gone wrong in my home that you could be lost here?"

"The Grove, Tob.... I am, exiled... I have long been able to listen to the Grove, to here it, a choir of life and death, night and day. The whole Ring of Life, singing in Harmony, in my soul, if I only opened myself to the music. But the Song has gone silent. Or perhaps I cannot hear it. I cannot enter the Grove to seek the Masters counsel. The living foliage actually moves to bar my way."

Janus stopped, momentarily, fighting to regain control of his emotions..... the tears forming in the corners of his blue eyes were a reminder of the impotence he was feeling at that moment, and he resented them for welling up, now.

"I am plagued by, dreams.... Visions.... nightmares, call them what you will, but they are fell and terrible. Every night the same. I've not had a nights sleep in a week. There is something very wrong, my Brother, ........."
Janus' words stopped hard in his throat. He looked into his comrade's face, not seeing him. He forced the words now, unable to prevent them from dripping with dread.

"The Storm comes."

"You've kept your covenants with Beldrem." Tob declared gently, rather than asked. His faith in Janus was as strong as he believed Janus's faith in Beldrem to be. "If the old man is keeping you out of the grove, you shouldn't be in the grove. If it isn't because you've done something wrong, than Beldrem needs you out here, and not in there." Tob was not a smart man, but his faith was deep, in his friends and in his gods. It was not his way, or he believed his place, to question either. He put his massive arm around his old friend's comparatively narrow shoulders, and gave the most reassuring smile the moment permitted. It looked like a rictus grin on a madman, and he smelled like a bear, but Janus could see clearly enough on Tob's face that he was trying to help Janus, so that he too could be helped. "Where should we go, to beat out this storm, or meet it with our own?"

Janus looked up at his Brother-in-Choice, the dark circles under his eyes framing a change in the blue pools. From a Man stuck in neutral, paralyzed by loneliness, to a man with a friend.

"Of course you're right, as usual, My Brother. Sitting here mourning what is lost..... will not make it change. However I honestly have no idea where to go, or whos counsel to seek. The Barons are consumed with their petty power struggle, and would only try to use any situation to their own advantage. In the vision, I stand on a high ridge over looking a plain, vast, and barren. It matches no landscape Ive seen on Derugar. I have nothing but my instincts now, Tob. But I think we must leave the island to seek aid in this matter. That means we have to go to Portsdale."

Janus shuddered as the words passed his lips. He hated that place. There were few trees, and the stench of humanity, fish, and oiled smoke assaulted ones senses Miles before you ever saw the place. But there was nothing for it. If one wanted to book passage to the mainland, one went to Portsdale.

"Portsdale. And then the sea? I can't think of any two places among men that we will fell less at ease, but there is no ease to be taken here, either."Tob spoke to Janus seriously, although he felt better than he had since he could remember. This tiny bit of familiar emotional ground was worth clinging to after nearly three years worth of fighting in and for a world that became more alien, along with Tob himself, every day. Janus knew who he was, and seeing Janus reminded Tob of who he was at his core. He felt less lost, although he was not looking forward to the journey his friend proposed.

"I don't like the idea, but that doesn't make it a bad one. I've always trusted your brains more than mine. Some days mine isn't fit to tan leather, and you usually have a knack for figuring things out better than I have." Tob chewed on his lip, and looked at the grove. A frontal assault would likely fail, and it wouldn't get him where he wanted to go anyway. He wanted to go into a grove that wanted him there.

"All right. Portsdale it is. Start now, at sundown, or at sunup? I would enjoy a meal and a bath in the Eld, if you think there's time. If not, I am already packed." And he was, always for the past three years. It was a state of perpetual readiness that his people adopted in their peripatetic culture, that yielded itself so well to his vocation. "Packed" was actually a word his people seldom used, since it's converse, "unpacked," happened with such rarity.

"You are too hard on yourself, by far, Tob, always have been. You've more than enough smarts to get your self back here alive, it seems. A fact that I am endlessly grateful for. A night under the stars, a bath in the cold waters of the Eld, and a meal, I think, I have no idea if we have time enough for it or not, My Brother. But I have some salted pork bread and cheese in my saddlebags, leaf in my pouch, and The Masters Berryshine in my flask. It's not the homecoming you deserve, but its the best I can do, under the circumstances."

Janus bent to pick up his staff, and motioned to the spot where he had left Tahoe, the smoke-gray stallion whom he had befriended after being released to assume his duties. There was no need for a tether, the Horse was faithful, and smart.

"Have you a mount, Tob? If not Tahoe will bear us both. Its only a short trot to the banks of the Eld."

"The miller agreed to keep Omkiri for me. He agreed that the horse would be mine if I came back, and his if I didn't. If the miller is still there and the horse is still there then I have a horse. We shall see when we get there." The mill to which Tob referred straddled the Eld, upstream from the area where he, Janus, and the rest of the people of that area of Caer Derugar swam, fished and bathed. "It's only another few miles to the Eld, and I've already walked the whole known lands. I'll spare Tahoe's back and walk along with him."

Janus clapped his friend on the shoulder, and whistled quietly at Tahoe, watching as the stud trotted across the clearing to them. "Then lets walk together, Brother, and try to enjoy our home before we leave it."

The young druid spared one last look over his shoulder at the grove as they meandered out of the clearing. He could still feel Jaydn, aggressive and on alert, on the other side of that barrier. The cat had never once acted that way towards him. His mind whirled as he wondered if his Master was allright, or if a madness had gripped his mind.

The woods around them used to share all of its secrets with Janus. Tob knew the land as well has he knew his own feet, and heard its language in his own way. The land still had words for the two of them, but they were not words of welcome. Tob saw the area as a mausoleum of the dead past, a place to visit and dust off cherished memories, leave flowers, and go on. To Janus the silent forest sounded like a reproach, and a condemnation from a mad zealot preaching doom in the agora. He feared the mad zealot was right.

GM OOC: You two have been great. This officially closes Prologue 1.