The Diaries of Cailo Ziim
Undated Entry
The last I remember, I was in the most desperate fight of my life. The cruelly smiling woman before me, her hatchets moved like the wind. She twitched the right hand axe, as if to swing low at my left thigh, and I swung my longsword down, point out, to intercept it. Too late, I realized the feint. The axe in her left hand connected with my chest. There were a variety of wet snapping and tearing noises, and pain beyond any I had ever experienced. And yet I could not seem to draw breath, even to scream. My knees buckled, and I could not hold the hilt of my sword.
As I was collapsing, I wondered how long this agony would go on. As if in answer, the hammer-back of her other hatched whistled toward my head. There was a thumping noise, a brief pressure at my temple, then blackness…
How did I come to be dying on the needle-covered floor of the Narlmarches, so far from my native Varisia? One could say that I was following a dream.
I was born the wandering clans, in the shadow of the Storval Rise, in the month of Neth, 4792. My Family moved throughout Varisia, among the ruins and monuments of an empire so powerful that not even the great Earthfall could blot its works from the face of Golarion. My earliest memories are of the statues and ruins of ancient Thassilon – a name I did not even know until my apprenticeship. My people knew that it was a realm of mighty wizards, and that its magic permeated the land even to this day: Many a Varisian was born a sorcerer, the magic inborn to them. I, alas, was not such a one, but magic fascinated me, and I was always full of questions about the wizards of old.
Legends of the empire that was have a dark cast in the tales of my people, and my fascination – obsession, some might say – was not greeted with enthusiasm. Every time the wagons passed some lonely stone sentinel, my eyes would be locked on it until it was out of sight – and my Family’s eyes would be on me.
I read voraciously, and learned everything I could of the wizard’s art wherever I could. The old hedge magician outside of Abken, the dwarven smith forging an enchanted hammer in Jaderhoff, the student of Korvosa’s Academae that traveled with us on his way home to Riddleport, the wandering Forlorn elf that walked with us for a season.
It was Vezariel, the elf wizard, that spoke at length with my family about my future. You will not turn aside this fascination, he said. He is more a child of Nethys, mysterious divinity of Magic, than of Desna. He was even born in that God’s month. His ways will not be your ways. Thus they spoke for many days. I was just entering my fifteenth year.
