White Silk: Exc. I.v

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Excerpt from Thrane Calton’s Heretic’s Voyage

1st ed., chpt. 2, par. 2 to 4, incl. footnotes

There are few sensations so strange as knowing that you are the heretic of a distant land wandering on the Pilgrim’s Road¹. The road is broad and flat, but little more than dirt packed down.²  Over so many centuries³ of walking, the edges of the road have gained a slope of sorts at the outer edges. The path is an indentation in the land like an ancient scar.

While the wonder of this place is said to be the great Verisvick River, I find greater wonder in the path before me. I try to imagine how many feet have stepped in the precise place that I step now. I follow the trail of Lady Aysha, perhaps the first pilgrim of Velran lore.⁴  I follow the trail of heroes and villains of legend. Yet perhaps most splendidly, I know that I share this path with not tens nor hundreds nor even thousands of pilgrims, but tens of tens of thousands.

They follow the Western Star⁵ , which the pilgrims say will guide them to their true home. I trace their footsteps along the Pilgrim’s Road to the Pilgrim’s Rest, a field where the green is again disrupted, this time by countless unmarked graves. I cannot help but wonder if the pilgrims buried here had clung to a false hope, never having made it to their true home. And then I wonder if perhaps they made it home after all.

1. Indeed, this road belongs to the pilgrimage in name as well as truth: It is the Pilgrim’s Road on all maps, and though it follows the Verisvick River for much of its course, maps mark the road separately.

2. Given the greenery of the surrounding area, and indeed the greenery of the Verisvick River itself, this is a greater feat than one may initially imagine. Were the road not traveled so often, it would doubtless be overrun with a thick verdigris of grass in the brief span of a few seasons.

3. “Centuries” may even be understatement. While records of the Ventian histories can verify that there were travelers along this road as far back as 306 P.V., those records in turn reference the road as a lasting mark on the landscape. It is uncertain whether the pilgrimage commenced after the rise of Cheyvelrus or had already been in existence in the long histories of Kolmas. Should the oldest and wildest of tales be true, however, one ought to say “millenia” of use rather than mere “centuries.”

4. Lady Aysha was the knight who would become Paladin Queen of Kolmas in 304 P.V., though her reign was cut unmercifully short. A mythologized version of the story is captured well by Samm Calder in Heptus Helentus IV, while a more historical accounting can be found in Ardor Baytan’s Beyond Saga: The Body of the Godlands, volume 6, section 34.

5. The Western Star is the wonder of Kolmas, and neither text nor tome can do it justice. It is a great beacon in the sky. Envision a lighthouse, then magnify its height by ten-fold and its luminescence by an hundred.

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