Role

Chapter 1

Flashes of white light... green grass... impossible beings of impossible beauty...
Joy... infinite joy... all-encompassing happiness in every pore, every speck, every atom...
An awareness of such colossal everythingness... unity of the universe... inconceivable
but at the same time the only way ever known...

And then a twitch... something has changed... what is it... something pulling...
something that is less than perfect gladness... pain as the absence of perfect joy...
confusion... movement? Is that movement?... more flashes... a pulling, a sucking, as
in a vortex... what...??

I am Dol. I have seen those glimpses, felt those feelings, all my life.
When I was a child I did not understand. My parents, lovely people, a farrier
and a transcriber, were overmatched by what they couldn't help but think was some kind
of illness, or even worse, possession. How close they were, and how far, too.
I don't remember, but they say I would repeat a very long bit of gibberish, over and over
and over. All they could make out was that it started with "dol", and eventually that's
what everyone just called me. What they didn't know was that "dol" is just the beginning of
the word for what I was, the part of me that makes me glow, that makes me different,
and is unprounouncable to mortals. Even me, now. I am human, but I am not. And I am Dol.
I will never again be all that followed Dol. Just Dol, now. I don't really feel the feelings
I saw in those flashes, and I am a man more than anything else. But I am aware. It is always
in the back of my head. A sense of utter loss, of an emptiness so vast it can't even be
expressed in words.

They didn't know what to do, so they did what most parents do: they sent me away.
Not to some horrible prison or asylum. A goodly place, with honest and caring people.
But with a martial bent. A philosophy that constant physical effort, learning to fight
and the ways of battle, can drive out what may ail you. Of course it didn't work but it did
give me a path to pursue to keep me fed and clothed as I grew older. And it also gave
me access to knowledge. Treatises on wars, on stratgy, on terrain and maps and geography
and religion and everything, for anything can be part of a war one way or the other.
And it was there that I came across the book that finally explained my existence.
I remember sitting there, stunned, as I read about what others call the "azure touched".
I read about how this mage, this conjurer, arrogant and drunk with the power of magic, ripped
apart the doorway, and now the lives of those in the Azure Fields are stolen, and shoved, thrust,
forced like slaves into this world, a world they have left, and from a world they had earned.
I did not move for hours.