THE LEGEND OF BOLDER

from

Tales of the True Men

chronicled in our time

by Jim Heter

Copyright ã 1977, 1993, 2009 by Jim Heter. All Rights Reserved.

 Contents

 Prelude:      Prologue (for Elders)                                                    

 

Part One:    The Plain Kingdom         LOB1PK.DOC                                             

      Chapter 1     The Lodestone

      Chapter 2     Elven Vale

      Chapter 3     The Troll Bridge

      Chapter 4     The Blockade

      Chapter 5     The Big Battle

 

Interlude:     Fragment from the Song of the Golden Knight              

 

Part Two:    The Big Bag Bog         LOB2BBB.DOC                                               

      Chapter 1     The Storm

      Chapter 2     The Irky Murky Forest

      Chapter 3     The Mound in the Middle

      Chapter 4     To the Rescue

      Chapter 5     The Behemoth of the Bog

 

Part Three:  The Red Tower     LOB3RT.DOC                                                     

      Chapter 1     The Trip

      Chapter 2     The Tower

      Chapter 3     The Angry Darks

      Chapter 4     Trade

 

Part Four:    Princess in Peril    LOB4PIP.DOC                                                  

      Chapter 1     The Celebration

      Chapter 2     Into the Frozen North

      Chapter 3     The Ice Giants

      Chapter 4     The Enchanted Valley     

      Chapter 5     The Escape

      Chapter 6     The Last Encounter

      Chapter 7     The Ride Homeward

 

Postlude:     The Song of the Silver Elf                                          

THE LEGEND OF BOLDER

Prologue

(for Elders)

 

Between the Old Time, which nearly everyone has forgotten, and the New Time, which most people believe is all the time there  has ever been, there was another time.  That was a time, remembered now only in legend, when the world was a place of dark mystery, and giants and demons were real and roamed the earth.

In those days the descendants of the True Men were just beginning to re-emerge in the track of time as a force to reckon with.  In the Old Time the True Men had been bringers of order, and had ruled the whole earth.  But at the end of their age the world was rocked by a great cataclysm.  Whether they brought it on themselves, or the old Chaos returned and overwhelmed them, the works of the True Men were brought to nothing.

In some regions the destruction was utter, and what emerged was totally new, and often monstrous.  In other regions  scattered traces of what had been still remained, though few there were indeed who could recognize or place a value on any of it.  The race of True Men was broken up into ragtag lots and bands.  Most descended into total savagery, some retained decaying fragments of their great heritage, and others were  transformed into mere shadows and mockeries of what had been.

Of all these, the most glorious and the most tragic were the Elves, who sacrificed all change for immortality.  The most mocked and least appreciated were the Dwarves, who merely  sacrificed stature and beauty for hardiness and utility.  The Elves had been the elite, the philosophers, the true priesthood of the old order, and they chose their lot willfully.  The Dwarves had their lot thrust upon them, and merely made the best of it they could, as was their nature.

The Elves had assembled in the geographical heartland of the world, the area they knew would suffer least from the cataclysm, and there by their subtle mastery of the ways of nature formed the bond of agreement whereby they would no longer age or die, but would live on to preserve what they could of the old world order through the difficult times they knew would lie ahead.

The Dwarves descended from a surviving band of skilled artisans and craftsmen.  They adopted for their homeland the rugged mountain country, believing that chambers tunneled in the living rock would endure future cataclysms better than the man-made structures they had seen tumble to dust.  They became a short, rugged, longlived but relatively infertile people, seemingly well adapted to their arduous environment.  They preserved many of the technical skills and accomplishments of the Old Time, a craftsmanship that would appear magical in later days.

After a long age of bitter despair, the scattered descendants of the old True Men began to grow in numbers and improve their conditions.  The Elves sought to teach these new Men some of the old wisdom, and encouraged the dwarves to pass on some of the old technology as well.  The Dwarves were reluctant, foreseeing in their hearts that it would mark their own doom, but they could not cope with the logical persuasiveness of the Elves.  The new Men learned slowly.  The Elves in their wisdom had patience, knowing that the path was a long one, although they feared that some of the spark of the old True Men was gone.  It was not in the nature of the Dwarves to have patience with incompetence, and they made their feelings known, which drew abuse back on their own heads, making them more reluctant than ever in their teaching role.

But the Elves could see that these descendants of the True Men had, in their youth, an ambition and enthusiasm which the Elves and the Dwarves both lacked.  The Elves knew that these qualities were necessary for a race to expand and raise the chaotic world around them out of its degraded condition to a new state of order and unity.  They knew also that these qualities could be both a gift and a curse.  Their hope was to impart to the new Men the technology to use the gift, and the wisdom to avoid the curse.  What the elves refused to see was how inevitably true wisdom comes only after the visitation of the curse, which is always an aftermath of new technology.

The tragedy of the Elves was that, in the pride and arrogance of their intimate understanding of the old world-order, they had overlooked the fact that they did not truly know how to reproduce that order out of the chaos which followed the cataclysm.  They knew, from their experience of the time of the cataclysm, what might have been done to prevent the catastrophe had it been properly anticipated, and their great ambition was to reestablish the old order in such a way that its downfall would not recur.  But in the desperate urgency of the need for survival in the chaotic aftermath of the upheaval nearly all of the old ways were lost to the new races of Men, and the Elves were faced with the task of introducing essentially primitive people to a complex and highly sophisticated culture.

Their earliest attempts, in which they merely tried to show the people what had been, and could be again, expecting to make the transition all at once, were discouraging failures, resulting in distorted cultures in which the Elves were looked upon as gods, who were variously worshiped, cajoled, or threatened that they might make life easier for the simple men about them.  The Elves abandoned these early attempts when they had lost control, and, beginning to recognize the problem, tried again with other groups of men.  But there were disagreements among the Elves themselves over what approach would be successful.

So the Elves scattered, some to the hardier races of the frozen North, some to southern climes where survival was less a struggle, and others elsewhere, following their own ideas of where they might successfully begin building their world anew.   As the span of their years stretched into the thousands, the Elves increased in wisdom, and they came to understand the true magnitude of the task they had set for themselves.  Some forsook the goal, and gave themselves up to death, but others carried on, still hoping to raise up from among the scattered tribes of men a great new world civilization, to which they could pass on their accumulated insight.

But many of the seeds they had planted had taken root, and were now growing in directions of their own.  Mythologies and superstitions had evolved around the early teachings of the Elves, and could not be easily displaced.  The Elves were too few to control the new destiny of the True Men.  There best hope was in trying to give guidance to key events wherever they could.  And they had learned that their uniqueness was not easy for other men to accept, so they played their roles behind the scenes as much as possible, and, slowly, faded out of history...

 

for Sean and Ryan

 

"So you want me to tell you a bed-time story, huh?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want it to be a fairy story?"

"Okay."

"A scary fairy story?"

"Yes!"

"A very scary fairy story?"

"Ummm!"

"Well this ones even better than that!"

"Oooh?"

"It's a very hairy scary fairy story!"

"Ahhh!"

"It all starts a long, long time ago..."

 

Fragment from the

Song of the Golden Knight

 

..

...It was then the Golden Knight came riding
          forward to the battle,
And his glory went before him like a blaze
          of golden light.
The courage in his bearing and his
          certainty of manner,
His proud and bold defiance bore the message
          of his might.
 
His enemies in terror scattered from
          the field before him,
They could not stand and face a man with strength
          as great as his.
A look of sadness touched the warrior's eye
          as he was watching,
For he knew what form of weakness made his foemen
          run like this.
 
In his heart he felt compassion as he thought
          about their weakness,
Of their souls locked up within them so their lives were
          filled with fears,
Of the courage that was in them, there imprisoned
          by their meanness,
By the things they would not face, that they kept buried
          in their years.
 
The sadness and the pity came to touch
          the warrior's visage
As he thought about the weakness that his
          enemies had shown,
For the Golden Knight remembered, from a time
          now well behind him,
That the weakness they were showing he himself
          had also known.
 
But the battle now was over and his thoughts
          turned to his lady,
To the kind and gentle lady who was waiting
          his return,
And as he thought about her, she who tugged upon
          his heartstrings,
A fire grew within him and a flame
          began to burn.
 
And the flame that grew within him matched the blazing
          of his armor,
And the singing of his heartstrings matched the singing
          of his sword,
So the bold and gallant warrior galloped off to
          meet his lady,
And his thoughts were of the lady know who he
          was riding toward.
 
She was waiting in a garden, and her
          loveliness reflected
All the loveliness of nature as she waited
          for him there.
Like a vision then he saw her in the beauty
          of the garden
And her face became the focus of a world
          immensely fair.
 
And the manner of this warrior when at last
          he met his lady,
Of this proud and fearsome warrior when at last
          he held her near,
Was as gentle as the manner of his own
          sweet gentle lady,
Was as gentle as the manner of the one
          he held so dear.
 

The Song of the Silver Elf

from 

Tales of the True Men

I.

I sing a song of long ago,

A song of ages lost,

A song of things you may not know

And what those things have cost.

 

I was a seeker then, as now,

As you, as all our kind;

We seek, we seek, and hope somehow

That someday we will find.

 

We came to Earth in ages past

From starry fields above.

We thought we'd found our place at last,

A home that we could love.

 

For we'd been wandering spirits who

Were looking for a home;

We hoped our wandering time was through,

With no more need to roam.

 

We saw in Earth an instrument

On which to play our song.

We thought that it would compliment

The dreams we'd brought along.

 

But Earth then needed making

To the mold of our desire.

Our labors set it shaking

As we stirred its stone with fire.

 

We came as wind and lightning,

As clouds that poured forth rain,

As summer sunrise brightening

On golden fields of grain.

 

Our only guide was dreaming

For we were here alone.

The One who set us scheming

Had left us on our own.

 

But all of us were Makers,

Each knew our purpose well,

Though where it all would take us

No one of us could tell.

 

We all had come to do it,

So each one did his best

To give his vision to it

And blend it with the rest.

 

High summer sun, cold winter chill,

White clouds that climb above,

The golden meadow, green-sward hill,

We formed it all with love.

  

II. 

Through what we were pursuing

We created storm and flood,

But that which took most doing

Was creating flesh and blood.

 

The simplest living creature

Is more complex by far

Than any other feature

Of this or any star.

 

Raw energy exploding

Takes a simple act of will,

But living takes encoding

With a high degree of skill.

 

To clothe in flesh the living

We brought about our death.

It took a lot of giving

To give one creature breath.

 

But one by one we gave it,

And made ourselves a game.

We had to die to save it;

Without death, things stay the same.

 

Persistence is stagnation;

We needed to destroy

Some parts of our creation

to bring a greater joy.

 

We gave ourselves to life this way

And living learned to die.

It seemed a simple price to pay

To let an eagle fly. 

 

Now every eagle soaring

Was a song to our desire.

The striped tiger roaring

Brought to life our inner fire.

 

Thus we became the living,

And by giving living birth

We found a way of giving

Something new, of greater worth:

 

A diversity of creatures,

Cricket, cobra, lion, lamb,

All evolving newer features,

Endless ways to say "I am".

 

By dying we could make it new

And keep the game alive.

We killed whatever wasn't true

And let the rest survive.

 

But having each a different form

New viewpoints soon arose

About which one would be the norm,

And who among us chose.

 

Some felt one form was suited best

To forwarding the plan;

They put their viewpoint to the test,

And took the form of man.

 

Since death a final answer gave,

Those who could not agree

Which forms should die and which to save

Must either fight or flee.

 

Survival then became the test,

The essence of our game.

Soon we'd forgotten all the rest,

Including why we came.

  

III. 

We came to Earth in ages past

And made the game of life,

But what that game became at last

Was endless grief and strife.

 

By tooth and claw to live or die,

That's how the game was played.

Each on his own was left to try

To make the bloody grade.

 

We fought with one another

And the elements around

And none would call one brother

Or would give an inch of ground.

 

Thus had the game grown bitter

So that no one had a friend,

But none would be a quitter,

Each continued to contend.

 

We waged our struggles on and on,

Now weak, now gaining might,

Our early purposes were gone,

We knew not wrong nor right.

 

So more and more we each became

Despairingly apart,

Forgetting why we played the game

And slowly losing heart.

 

Then only procreation

Left a taste of what had been,

A thrill of the sensation

That we had come to win.

 

Had we not kept that going

For making life anew

We might have lost all knowing

Of what we once could do.

 

And even that was all but lost

Amidst the bitter strife.

We paid a heavy, heavy cost

For hanging onto life.

 

IV. 

Was it not strange that no relief

Was found except in death?

What happened to the old belief

That life meant more than breath?

 

Some still could pose that query,

Were seeking still our goal,

And had not grown too weary

To reassess our role.

 

They wished to ease our burden,

To make the game more fun,

Stop killings that occurred when

Something better could be done.

 

They looked around themselves and knew

That life was much the same

For all their struggling fellows who

Were with them in the game.

 

They saw that what was needed

Was the same for every man,

And when this clue was heeded

They began to form a plan.

 

They thought that if they were to share

Their work to stay alive

Then everyone would better fare

And they might all survive.

 

So then they grouped together and

Divided one for one

Among the members of their band

The things that must get done.

 

To some it fell to tend the nest,

Some husbanded the food,

Each doing most what he did best

And doing all he could.

 

Now this was quite efficient

And we found that we could reap

A harvest so sufficient

We had extra left to keep.

 

V.

It was thus, of those who started,

We who took the forms of men

Got our early goals recharted,

Started upward once again.

 

For those who grouped together,

Building shelters, picking fruit,

Could withstand more bitter weather,

Could sink a deeper root.

 

This way, we came to understand,

If hard times struck a few

Their fellow men could lend a hand

And we might all pull through.

 

This gave us something new that we

Had never known before,

Another way for life to be,

With more than death in store.

 

For when a man grew weary now

Of struggling to survive

His friends would help him out somehow

That he might stay alive.

 

This way we found another aim,

Another goal in life

Beyond the mere survival game,

Beyond the endless strife.

  

No more just striving not to die,

At living now we played,

To dream new dreams and then to try

How real they might be made.

 

Thus helping one another

Gave us all a chance to grow;

By working with each other

Each can learn what others know.

 

Now we could see the path ahead

Was leading toward the light.

Less death, and more of life instead;

We had things going right.

 

By helping one another

To fulfill each basic need

We made a chance for other

Aims of being to succeed.

 

We began to think of beauty,

Planting flowers just for joy

And refining skills we knew we

Might more artfully employ.

 

Our shelters grew to towers,

Slender spires of artful grace,

Blooming gardens now of flowers

Grew in every open space.

 

Soon artifacts of every kind

For easing labor's strains

And cultivation for the mind

Were adding to our gains.

 

This way we built a nation,

And from that nation came

A great civilization

With a proud and mighty name.

 

We were proud and mighty masters

Of the world and all its ways

But a series of disasters

Brought an ending to our days.

 

VI.

As I've sung you of our glories

So I'll sing you of our fall.

These are very ancient stories,

Tales that should be known to all.

 

Our world was wrapped in beauty,

We had mastered every art,

For each man knew his duty

And each one did his part.

 

We gloried in the wonder

Of the things that we could do.

Our arts controlled the thunder

And the wind and lightning too.

 

We soared above the azure skies,

We sailed the gray-green seas,

We made the mighty mountains rise,

We grew the towering trees.

 

We had started close to nature,

Deep in nature was our source,

With every other creature

In agreement with our course.

 

For man in his expansions

Was fulfilling basic dreams

Of making many mansions

For achieving many schemes.

 

Then slowly man forgot that

Such agreement had to be,

But nature knows its not that

Way in this reality.

 

At first we got agreement

Out of habits carried long,

Assumption of the old intent

That man would mean no wrong.

 

But nature's other beings

Who had kept to older ways

Began at last to see things

Growing worse with passing days.

 

Men had broken the agreement,

We had put them in our thrall,

And they realized that we meant

To be masters over all.

 

We ruled the oceans, sailed the skies,

And rearranged the land,

But such a culture, built on lies,

Could not forever stand.

 

Our pride obscured the harmony

That helped us rule the Earth.

We came to feel that only we

Could say what life was worth.

 

Forgetting former brothers

And what they had to say,

We stood against these others

Who were keeping nature's way.

 

We stirred the giant sleeping,

We defied the grand design,

By building without keeping

All of nature well in mind.

 

That was when the hills and mountains

We had built our homes upon

Tumbled down, or burst in fountains

Spouting fire, and were gone.

 

The oceans swelled, the prairies reeled,

The skies grew dark with smoke,

The rock ran red then recongealed

Or buckled up and broke.

 

In those terrifying hours

Gleaming metal turned to rust,

Our proud and graceful towers

Fell to ruin, ash and dust.

  

VII. 

As our world collapsed around us

There were some of us who knew

Why disaster thus had found us,

And what we would have to do

 

To prevent such devastation

If we ever got a chance

To rebuild our fallen nation,

To again help man advance.

 

For we had come to know again

That there are many things

That help make up the world we're in,

Surrounding us, like rings.

 

Around us each, our brothers,

Here to live as I with you;

The world rings us with others

And surrounds these others too

 

Till all mankind is turned around

Like hoops within a wheel,

And mankind too is wrapped and bound

With all else that is real.

 

As we became again aware

Of nature's basic plan

We knew that we could better fare

In making space for man.

 

So then our aim became to keep

From losing what we knew,

To stay alive, and never sleep,

To do what we must do

 

To come back from disaster,

To renew the human race,

To again make man the master,

But now to know his place

 

Not alone among his brothers

But with all of nature too,

In harmony with others

With a different point of view.

 

For the world is full of forces,

Full of beings playing games;

We must all align our courses,

We and those with other aims.

 

With this in mind I sing you now

This story of your past

In hope that it may show you how

To make your nation last.

 

 

VIII.

I bring this song from long ago

And hard times gone between

To help you know the things I know

And what these things can mean.

  

As I sing you now, my brothers,

Of that old time long ago,

Will you learn from what those others

Couldn't see and wouldn't know?

 

Will you learn again the reason

Why we're here, and whence we came?

Will you bring another season

To the making of our game?

 

Will you know now all the levels,

The intricacies, of life?

Will you cast aside your devils

And reduce your senseless strife?

 

Will you go working hand in hand,

With purpose, toward a goal

Of harmony in all the land

Remembering nature's role?

 

Will you overcome the errors

That once brought your fathers low

And avoid the ancient terrors

That have made of death a foe?

 

Will you bring about survival

In the way it ought to be,

So a man can be your rival

But is not your enemy,

 

Where man and every living thing

In all the halls of Earth

Are echoing this song I sing

Of what the world is worth?

 

I sing you now a future day

Of peace and harmony,

Of freedom then to go the way

Existence ought to be.

 

With free and bold creation

To contribute to the plan

What a great civilization

Will we then have made for man!

 

Can you see it now, my brothers?

What this world of ours can be,

For both us and all the others,

Living high and full and free.

 

Help me dream anew the vision

Of a world where life is good.

Come now, show me that my mission

Hasn't been misunderstood.

 

Come show me what you understand

Of how to change and grow,

Of how to make the things you've planned

Merge with creation's flow.

 

Come join me in my singing

Of a future that is bright,

Come help me now in bringing

All our brothers to the light.

 

Come sing the love of living

And of setting star-high aims,

Come sing the joy of giving

Our creations to the games.

 

Come sing my song of being

For my song is your song too.

A world awaits its freeing,

There is much that we can do.

 

 

.