On the other side of a continent, across rivers flowing inexhaustibly toward their destined meeting with the seas, beyond fields ripe with crops, over mountains jagged and snowcapped, and through moon-shaded cities momentarily giving their problems over to sleep lay Jaret Rammeriz. He was broken, battered, and barely sane, but against all logic, hope, and mercy, he was alive.
When he had crashed into the wall of the imperial throne room, his last thought had been that he was going to die. In that moment of pain and terror, he had welcomed that escape. The ability to leave the troubled world and return to the purifying light of order had seemed a blessing, and he had embraced the pain that he knew would lead the way to death’s consolation.
But death had not come. Instead, he found himself locked in a stark cell drifting in and out of dreams and half-dreams so horrible that he wondered if he had been cast into the storms of chaos rather than welcomed into the serenity of order. He lost track of how many times he had awaken, or if he ever had, given that the images from his dreams never really left. He remembered seeing the blank walls of his cell, the light moving across the stone floor, the stout wooden door that constrained him, but those realities were marred by terrible spectral shapes that crept about the room, taunting him and poking at him with their talons. To expel those horrors, he presses his eyes shut and fell back into dreams where the specters were not so easily dismissed.
Finally, one morning – at least it felt like morning – he woke without the half-dream daze obscuring his vision, woke and actually felt awake. Despite having control of his consciousness, all he managed to do was stare at the dreary cell walls and wonder how he could not be dead. The memory of what he had seen haunted him more thoroughly than his dreams ever could, and when he realized that this was not another dream, that this was reality, he wept for the first time in more than twenty years. He wept into the rough straw mattress beneath him until he returned to the nightmarish sleep that was now a solace.
A loud clank of metal on metal followed by the scrape of wood on stone and another authoritative clank pulled Jaret from that troubled sleep. Recognizing the sound that had summoned him, he scanned the room for visitors, but the room was empty, stark walls bare. He thought the sound must have been someone entering the cell, but another look revealed only a crust of hard bread and a small cup of water at the bottom of the door.
Jaret moaned as his body reminded him of the punishment it had received. Every corner of it ached. His arms and legs tingled with pins and needles. His head pounded. And his ribs erupted into searing pain with every breath. He was as debilitated as he remembered his generously scarred body ever being until even his well-earned resistance to pain could barely withstand the collection of miseries.
Despite those afflictions, it was the ache for water that shone the brightest. Jaret felt like he had not had a drop of it in a year, and he continued staring at the small cup an impossible ten feet away until the need was so great that he would suffer anything to fulfill it. Thus it was that without any idea how he would accomplish it, he started the impossible journey to that precious tin cup.