The old archivist squinted his eyes to shield them from the beam of sunlight shining directly through a small window and turned another page of the tome he was reading from. The tome looked old and worn, though in truth it was not that old at all. Not that old, at least, when compared to the many maps filled with records that lined the walls of the small provincial archive that was his domain. But the archival records were hardly ever touched, whereas his book had been read again and again. The old archivist had to do something to fill his days, after all. Few people ever came to his small cramped office. Fewer of them still came on business. Most who did visit were locals from the little town, coming to check up on their old friend at his post. Not much of note had happened in that small archive of an out-of-the-way municipality at the edge of the civilized world. Not for close to two decades, at least.

In all of the years since that day eighteen years ago, the most exciting thing that had happened was the time a half-elf had come, in order to find out more about his human ancestry. But on that sunny day something was going to happen in that cramped record office that would put the events of two decades earlier to shame. 

 

The stranger came in without knocking, opening the door with purpose, then quickly closing it behind them.

The archivist looked up from his book, expecting to see a familiar face. The mayor perhaps, asking for advice as he was wont to do sometimes. Or perhaps little Agatha. She liked to come in once her chores were done and pester him with questions he knew not the answers to. Instead he saw a figure wholly unfamiliar to him. A figure draped in a large cloak that draped down from their shoulders, covering the stranger’s body in blackness all the way down to a pair of riding boots. The cloaked figure was nothing like the inhabitants who lived in the small outpost at the edge of the world. Nor did they look like the occasional farmer from one of the province’s many tiny villages. They would occasionally come in to look up their family’s history. The figure’s entire stance betrayed a tenseness that was not often seen in these parts. A tenseness that unsettled the old archivist in its implications.

The stranger looked back towards the door once more, and then removed their hood. Sticking out above the black cloak was the face of a young woman. The first thing that stood out to the archivist was that her short brown hair was a mess. It looked as if somebody had cut it very short not too long ago, and it had only grown out evenly from there, without any fixes to make the cut seem more natural. Her hazel eyes were nervously glancing around the room, checking the rows of bookcases holding the records of all three centuries of human occupation of this out-of-the-way province before finally settling their gaze on the old man sitting behind his desk.

“Is this the records office of the province of East Livelton?” she asked in a tone of seeming casual interest, though the archivist knew enough about people to notice the underlying anxiousness. He also knew enough of people to know when somebody might give trouble. Most of the time that trouble would just consist of some of the local boys pulling a ‘prank’, but this seemed like it might be more serious.

“It is,” the archivist replied cautiously. He got up from his chair and continued, “Are you here to look up something in particular?”

The woman nodded slowly in acknowledgment. 

“Well, how about you hang your coat over there and we’ll get started then!” the archivist said in a feigned jovial tone, pointing at an old coat hanger next to the door. A coat hanger that currently held nothing but his own weathered brown coat. Or what could still pass for a coat by a not too picky observer at least.

For a short while it seemed like the stranger was going to ignore his request. Then slowly, hesitantly, she did turn around and make her way over to the coat hanger. The archivist took his chance as soon as she had turned around and quickly but quietly opened a cupboard. Inside was a small knife. A letter opener, in truth. It was obviously not much good in a fight, but better than nothing. 

The archivist quickly stuffed the thing in his pocket, but realised his folly when he looked back over at the stranger. Her black coat was now hanging next to his brown one and its absence revealed a toned warrior’s body in a vibrant red suit of ornate armour. The archivist had no idea what material it was, but judging by the fact he did not recognize the material, and the level of craftsmanship of it, it had to be dwarven and it must have cost a fortune. 

Despite the high level of craftsmanship, the suit of armour seemed to not quite have been designed with the woman in mind. It was too big in some places, and too small in others. Even more troubling than any aspect of the armour was the ornately decorated sword hanging from a belt on the stranger’s hip. 

As the young woman made her way to his desk once more, the archivist nervously asked: “So what records specifically are you interested in?” It was a senseless question. He already knew the answer. There was only one answer that made sense. Only one answer that would explain why somebody who wore something like that and was acting as nervous as she was would come all the way out here to the middle of nowhere to look at the records of some backwater province. 

“I am here to look at the records of births,” the stranger replied.

“Ah, is this about family, or….?” 

“Something like that.”

“What birth records in particular are you looking for?” the archivist said, trying to feign ignorance.

The stranger paused for a second, then answered the words he knew she was going to say: “I need the information you have of all those born on either the 17th or 18th of Freymorn, nineteen years ago.”

The archivist stared at her for a bit. He had a choice to make. The safest thing to do would be to just hand her the records and pretend nothing strange had happened at all. Somehow, though, his courage won out over his fear. 

“I am sorry, miss, but those records are restricted,” he mumbled. “I ummm... I am afraid you will have to get written permission from the provincial governor to apply for access.”

The stranger hesitated. She looked at the archivist, then at the bookcases behind him. Then she looked over her shoulder at the door she came from. For a moment the archivist dared to hope that she would leave. 

Then she looked back at him with an unnerving intensity, and drew her sword. “Here is my ‘written permission,’” she said, her voice forceful but shaking ever so slightly.

There was only one door to the creaky old office, and the stranger with the sword was standing in front of it. The archivist briefly considered the letter opener in his pocket. But quickly his thoughts turned to Agatha and her questions, and the unfinished book on the table. 

“Follow me then,” he replied wearily. 

The old man had no trouble navigating the rows of maps and files that were starting to outgrow the confines of the small office and he quickly found the right volume. He knew the sorting system by hand. He had designed it himself, after all. 

He briefly considered giving the stranger the wrong dates, or to try and somehow omit the one name that really mattered. But if she saw through it, he might die. He ended up resolving that this was not his battle. He was just a record keeper. This was clearly not a situation he could be expected to handle. So he simply handed her the files she wanted. All of them, though the names were only enough to fill two pages in any case. Then he made a silent prayer to the Almotter that she would let him live. 

The stranger sheathed her sword and attentively started going through the names. As she was doing so, perhaps due to the lack of a sword in his face, the old man’s courage found him once more. “You’re…. human, right?” he asked nervously, “like me?” He had never heard about Its servants being able to disguise themselves so well as to look as much as a human as she did, but he was hardly an expert on the extent of Its powers. 

She looked up from the pages, and gave a curt nod.

“Then….” the old man continued “I don’t know what It is paying you, but whatever that is, it’s not enough. It can never be enough. If It gets to Him or His relatives before it is time—”

“You have me all wrong!” the stranger interrupted. “I am not here for that, I am…..” She trailed off for a bit, clearly thinking. Then she continued, “I am simply looking to find Him. For a good cause, I can assure you of that.”

The old man looked at her suspiciously. “If you want to find Him, you don’t have to go looking here. Everyone knows where He is. He is being trained by the best of the best, hundreds of miles from here, at the fortress of Havensdale.”

“I am afraid that’s not true,” she replied nonchalantly, as if she hadn’t just said something that could mean the world was doomed. Then she turned her attention back to the pages she was holding.

“Did something happen, then?” the archivist asked worriedly.

“No.”

“Then how—”

“He simply never arrived,” the stranger stated matter-of-factly, her eyes never leaving the pages.

“That’s impossible!” the old man objected: “I helped the paladins find Him myself, two decades ago, and they—”

“These are all boy names,” she interrupted. “Were there no girls born on these dates?”

The old man looked back at her puzzled. “The girl records are on the other side, over there, but why would—”

“Bring me them,” she replied.

The old man hesitated, and the stranger put her hand on her sword’s hilt once again. The man understood the hint and went and got the girls’ records. It was after all not like it could hurt to give her those, right?

The stranger accepted the new files, and actually gave back the old ones. The archivist looked on baffled as she started going through the new files even more attentively than before. He briefly considered that the paladins had changed something in his records. Hid His records between those of the girls as a trick, and that somehow she was aware of it. But as he checked the files themselves, He was still there. The records noted that He was born on the 18th, though in truth the archivist of course knew that He had been born at the exact moment between the 17th and 18th. At midnight, as the planets were in perfect alignment once again. For the fourth time, to mark the beginning of the end of the fourth era. 

The woman took the papers and walked back to the table the archivist had been reading his book on. She took out a map and started making notes on it, looking back and forth at the pages with the locations of all the girls born and the map. 

“You may go now,” she said, without taking her eyes from her work.

“I…. what?” 

“I said you may go now. I have all I need. Or you may stay, if you wish. I won’t be long in either case.”

The archivist nervously started making his way to the door, afraid that she might change her mind at the last second. After he passed the table without incident though, his curiosity got the better of him. “How do you know He is not in Havensdale?”

The woman was silent for a bit. Then she finally replied, in a soft voice: “I just know.”

“But if He is not there, the paladins would have kept looking, wouldn’t they? They would be scouring the province for Him right now, they wouldn’t just sit around for eighteen years with Its arrival coming closer the way it is.”

“Look here—” the woman started, in an annoyed tone. But she never did finish her sentence, as she fell quiet when the doors to the old building opened for the second time in a short period. The archivist saw the woman turn pale at the sight of those behind him, and she hurriedly made to stash the map and files away again.

Turning around, the old man saw two figures who, if at all possible, stood out even more as strangers than the young woman did. But they were not strangers. Not to him at least. He had met them before, eighteen years ago. 

The man in front was older than the archivist, though he did not look like it. His muscled physique made him look closer to half his real age. Even little Agatha would have known his name, though she would have been unlikely to recognize the man that she only knew from stories. Andreas. The Silver Sword. The Serpent-Slayer. The Undefeated. Though that last title was not quite true anymore since a decade or two... In his youth he had gained his fame by going from city to city and winning every tourney he was eligible for. In his later years he had proven he was just as effective on the battlefield as he had been on the tourney fields. Now he was dressed in paladin’s armour, which must have been a confusing sight for any who had known him when he was a promiscuous youth. 

Following closely behind him was a man older still, though he too did not look his real age, which came in at over two centuries. Archmages had ways to achieve that effect which they were not willing to share with the rest of the world. He too was widely known, though there were not many heroic stories about him. Mineander. The Kingmaker. The Scourge from Sylmarel. In his younger years he had been a powerful force any monarch had had to reckon with. He had been known to win entire wars just with the power of his magic alone. After close to a century of supporting that monarch or that one, from which he got quite a sinister reputation, he swore off politics altogether and had opened the most prestigious mage’s college outside of the Elven Lands. His robes were the same as they always were, though on them too a paladin symbol had been stitched on.  

The archivist looked unsurely at the men entering his office, and then back at the young woman behind his desk, who was having difficulty stuffing the map back from where she had taken it from. The three of them entered an odd stand-off and the archivist was caught right in the middle.

“Go home, good sir,” the old archmage said, looking at the archivist without any sense of recollection. “We will deal with this interloper.”

The archivist looked back at the young woman, who made no move to object to these directions. “Should I get the town guard?” he whispered to the men.

“No.” Andreas spoke sternly.

“But—”

“Go!”

The archivist looked back one more time and then made his way through the small door. He would consider several times to call the town guard after all, just in case, but would end up not doing so. Instead he ended up doing exactly what he was told to do, and went home. He would sit there for two hours wondering what was happening in his office, and when he finally got the courage to come back there all three of the interlopers would already be gone. 

As such, the archivist missed the first words that the two uttered at the young woman. If he had, it would have answered many of his questions, and raised a hundred more. 

-

“That is you, right, Oriandus?” Andreas spoke: “Tell me quickly, what is this madness?”

“That is not my name,” the young woman responded.

“Of course it is your name!” the seasoned warrior responded angrily. “It is the name given to every damn hero who has come before you.”

“So it is,” the woman replied. “And therefore it is not mine.”

The corner of the old fighter’s mouth turned in disgust. “What have you done to yourself? What have you done to your body? All of those years of training I put you through and you manage to waste it all in a single month on your own?!”

“Moon draught,” the archmage interjected before the woman had a chance to respond. “What you are seeing are the results of it being applied every day. It can be reversed, if need be.”

“Gods, what cowardice brought you here? You really think it is this easy? You just find somebody else to do what you could not and be done with it?”

“You know why I am here.”

“Don’t you dare say it!”

“I am not Him.” the woman stated, despite the warrior’s objections.

The archmage gave a deep sigh. “We have discussed this before, Oriandus—” 

“Maia,” the woman brusquely interrupted.

“—I will repeat what I said back when you first asked: there is nobody else.” Mineander continued unabated. “Prophecy does not lie, I am afraid. We were thorough. No other boy was born at the right place nor at the right time. It has to be you. There are no others.”

“I….” Maia responded, though she was already starting to sound less sure. “I’m not…. I’m not a boy. The prophecy can’t be about me,” she continued, though by the end she was mumbling.

Mineander gave another deep sigh; Andreas just scowled.

“Look, sir,” she continued, her confidence picking back up with every word. “You have said yourself time and time again that I was too far behind. That my magic was too weak for where I was supposed to be. I still have trouble casting more than one intermediate spell in a row without fainting! That does not make sense, right? If I really was the Hero, I should have more magic potential than this. Clearly I am not Him.”

“I have also said many times that you were undisciplined, unfocused, easily distracted and that you do not put your heart fully into your training,” the archmage replied. “If you just try to focus and apply yourself better”

“I HAVE BEEN TRYING!” the young woman screamed back, tears starting to form in her eyes. “I have tried, okay! I tried and I tried and I tried again. Eighteen long years I have tried. I can’t. I can’t anymore. I’m sorry.”

The archmage sighed once more. “Ori—” he started, before cutting himself off and sighing a fourth time. “Look, I am not saying you are lazy.”

“I am,” Andreas interjected.

Mineander shot him an angry look and continued: “As I was saying, you are not wholly at fault. Learning magic is, unfortunately, hard. But the fact that you have any magic potential at all proves that you are Him. It is incredibly rare, only one in a hundred have any potential. And as I have said before, there are no other candidates. We were quite thorough. We checked all those born in a wide area around the location and the time.”

Maia wiped away the tears that had been forming on her eyes and got the documents that she had just stuffed away back out and put them on the table between them. “What about these, did you check them?”

Andreas moved first, stepped forward and yanked the files from the table. 

“These are all girl names.” he stated dryly after having quickly scanned the files.

“Are they?” Maia asked defiantly.

“The prophecy specified it would be a boy. Like it has been every time before now.”

“What if they’re like me?”

“Disappointments?” Andreas sarcastically replied.

“No,” Maia responded in a slightly annoyed tone. “Children of Anya. Born wrong.”

Andreas scoffed. “That’s not how prophecies work. Look, nothing against children of Anya, I dated one of them for a while, but a prophecy wouldn’t be fooled—”

“Andreas, I would think very carefully about your next few words,” Mineander interrupted. “Because what I am hearing sounds an awful lot like blasphemy.”

The old warrior looked back with disbelief. “Mineander, you can’t seriously believe a prophecy would—”

“I can and do. The existence of the children of Anya is not up for debate. What I am less certain of is whether our young protegé is in fact one of them.”

“You believe they are not up for debate,” Andreas objected. “I know for a fact a great many people would disagree with you.”

“Sir,” Maia said, turning her attention to her old magic teacher. “You agree then, the prophecy could have been about them! These people that you just assumed were girls. But they might not be. At least one of them might not be. And you didn’t check any of them, did you?”

The archmage gave another long sigh. “We did not, no. Though we would probably have heard something about this person if they did in fact exist. Talent like that in such a rural area would stand out like a sore thumb. But do you realise what you are asking me to accept here? Anya’s children are rare. Very rare. You expect me to believe that not only are you one, but that there is another one as well, that was born on the exact same night, at the exact same time? And that just coincidentally you do have magic talent, despite not being Him. What are the odds, Oriandus?”

“But—”

“Look here,” Andreas interrupted. “I have known many men, and many women. Some quite surface level, many more quite a lot more intimately. And I have known you for all of your life as well. Mineander as well, and beside him many of the brightest minds from across the three continents. Do you really think none of us would have noticed? None of us would have picked up on it? You were a boy through and through, and obsessed with being the Hero. It was all you talked about. All you thought about. And now you chicken out? Face it, this is all just cowardice. It was nice when it was just a story. When you were just special. But now the time is approaching when you will have to fight It, and you chicken out. You are too afraid to face It, and looking for an excuse. To put it on somebody else.”

“No!” Maia responded, as the tears came once again. “I…. you don’t know me. I wasn’t supposed to. I was supposed to….. I was supposed to want to be Him. And so I did. Maybe I even really did want to be Him. I think…. I think I really did. It would have been so much easier…. I could do so much good that way! I wanted to do good. To be what people needed. But… But I wasn’t Him. I never was, and it became harder and harder to pretend I was. I just… I couldn’t keep going on.”

There was silence for a bit. Even Andreas seemed uncertain of what to say next. 

“Please,” Maia finally continued. “Just let me try. At least let me try. There aren’t that many names. It will take a month. Maybe two. That’s all I’m asking.”

“And if you are wrong?” Mineander asked. “If you are the Hero after all. If it is you who is supposed to face It?”

“Then I will try. And I will die,” Maia responded bitterly.

Silence hung over the room once more. 

“No.” Andreas replied finally.

“No?”

“No. I am not letting you waste time on this nonsense.”

“It is just two months! After that I’ll be back, I promise—”

“It is two months now, but it will soon be four, or even more. We only have three more years to get you into shape. Yet you are wasting time and damaging your own body with this nonsense. So here is what is going to happen. You are coming back with us. You will stop whining. You will stop complaining. You will do better and then you will face It and beat It.”

The woman took one uncertain step towards the duo and for a second it seemed like the situation was going to be resolved peacefully. Then she stopped again. “No,” she simply said, and drew her sword.

“You fool,” Andreas responded, as he drew his own in kind. “You are going to try and fight me? ME? You have never been able to beat me, let alone now with what you have done to yourself.”

“If I really was Him,” Maia bitterly responded, “shouldn’t I have won by now?”

Andreas didn’t answer, instead he simply took a step forward. Then another, faster this time. Then he froze up and fell over.

“Wha—”

“Go.” Mineander stated. “It won’t last very long on him.”

“I… thank you so much, sir,” Maia responded gratefully as she sheathed her sword once more.

Mineander sighed once more as he poked Andreas with his staff. “Just stick to your promise. Be back in two months or I will find you once again, you can be certain of that.”

“Thank you for believing in me, sir,” Maia said earnestly.

Mineander sighed once more. “Truthfully I don’t believe you,” the archmage responded. “I am simply thinking logically about the situation where Andreas is not. You have gotten this in your head, and it will not be beat out of you. If we do not let you try this folly, then your attitude towards training will only suffer severely. You will escape again. Or try to, in any case. Though…. on the off chance that you are right, I suppose it is good to be certain regardless.”

Maia briefly frowned, before recomposing herself once again. She bent down and pried the records that Andreas was still holding in his frozen hands free. All the while his eyes, the only part of him not frozen, were angrily following her every move. She made her way past the archmage to the exit and pushed open the doors.

As the sunlight streamed in behind her, she said: “I am sorry to hear that, sir. But I am not Him. Whether you believe me or not.”