I first met Drifter in the spring after the Great Contest was called. The aspirations of my contemporaries irritated me, prompting a sabbatical of sorts to what could charitably be called the arse end of nowhere. I spent days on the road between the small villages on the eastern border of Miurnia, and even in the most accommodating of villages the locals did more glaring than speaking. After weeks of hearing scholars expounded on their eventual accolades it was as perfect as the galaxies in the rural sky.

  The most interaction I had with anyone was the day a bandit group accosted me. Bandits were always present in the Etherlands, leeching what they could from civilization, but in the time between ages many otherwise law-abiding citizens turned to crime. Did they wonder if they could strong-arm their way to godhood? Did they believe it to be the end of days and simply gave up on morality? I have no answers to these questions, as the bandits I encountered did not seem to be the talking sort. The only words they spoke were "ye walla o ye lif" which prompted no desire to continue a conversation.

  Had they been content with my wallet it would have been an uneventful exchange, but instead they wanted to check my bags. I thought that was no problem—I prefer to travel light—but I miscalculated. Among my rations so unappealing even a beggar would turn their nose up, and my clothing so out of fashion that a farmer in the sticks would snicker, my bag contained a plethora of writing equipment: inks, pens, and paper.

  Paper, in this region of rock and moss, was worth a fair amount more than the literacy rate would imply. Beyond the obvious uses, it could be used to wrap goods for transport and to quickly patch holes in homes and clothes to keep the wind out. Someone without reading or writing ability could still make marks to keep track of items outside of their brain. For someone desperate a stack of paper could even serve as armor.

  Being a scholar, it was worth quite a lot to me, as well, and I made an awful show at trying to protect it.

  While I lay on my back, barely conscious from the beating I received, a shadow dwarfed my being. It seemed too large to be a man; it looked closer to a cloaked monstrosity, silhouetted by the mid-morning sun into a pitch-black demon. I saw not a savior, which is what he turned out to be, but impending doom, which is what he turned out to be for my aggressors.

  "Hae viri doles?" The shadow spoke while looking down at me. My addled brain could not parse the old tongue, though I had read it plenty in my studies. I stared at him, going over the sounds in my mind, until he clarified with a heavy accent: "have you harmed these men?"

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  That was the moment I knew I was talking to someone special. He saw a man beaten half to death and his first thought was whether the man deserved it.

  It took me a few moments to work myself up to a response, but the man waited patiently. "I did nothing to these men. They simply robbed me." In retrospect, this was an odd way to communicate my situation, but the shadow nodded and spoke to the bandits in the old tongue, and they responded with a series of curses in the local dialect. And then the bandits died.

  It remains hard to describe, even after watching Drifter do this on a near-weekly basis for the past few months. I assume he swings his sword, as his hand rests on its hilt, and presumably there's magic involved due to the absurd nature of the situation, but the bandits' chests split apart in a shower of blood with no indication that anything else had happened. The man gave his sword a wave to shake the blood off, the single-bladed design angled to draw the blood off the blade, and then he sheathed it in its ragged cloth and leather harness.

  I had seen Demigods and Heroes before, and their countenance left me awestruck. They were human but greater than human in many ways, beyond understanding though their words and actions make sense. Before me now was a being who was utterly beyond me. In a short span of a minute he had done nothing but shock me.

  The man pulled me to my feet, allowing me to finally beholding my savior in full. There was nothing heroic about him; his clothing was ragged and tattered, more a conglomeration of repairs and patches than a purposeful outfit. Rather than a proper cloak, he shrouded himself with an expertly removed beawulf hide, the mass of fur fitting his giant stature perfectly. He carried no bag, no supplies, only a standard sword in a makeshift sheath.

  His left hand, pulling mine, was adorned with five rings, each made in a different style from a different culture. His right hand, left resting on the pommel of his blade, was the same.

  Every word out of his mouth made sense but was baffling. "Can you retrieve your own coin purse?" I nodded, and he nodded, and he left.

  I retrieved—among other things, for I am not so honorable a man as to let food and coin go to waste—my bag from the bandits, and I looked down the road to the shrinking figure.

  I felt the itch that had consumed my colleagues back at Docet Barrington. My brain went to the death of the old gods, the birth of the new, and the contest to find them.

  My favorites for the Great Contest were Paronius, and Godoran, and Plaint, all three the typical heroic sorts you would expect to find godhood given the chance. But I could feel years of assumptions crumble away as I thought over the last few minutes. I had never thought to truly understand the gods before; why did it feel like a prerequisite now?

  I felt that things would fall in to place if I could catch up with this man. And so I followed him until he stopped for the night.