Arcana: Myths & Legends

Walker's Footsteps

Spherewalker Origins, Part Three

by Mark Edwards

From the journals of Fading Light--scholar, mage and spherewalker.

On a sphere called Fear, in realm called Shadow, I found the proof of what I had sought for ninety three summers.

It was in a rift in the earth, as the others have been, a small jagged valley. This one had a mud-wall shrine perched on the edge. A sallow priestess welcomed me, took the goat I had brought as an offering, and led me to the back wall of the shrine. It seemed that the villagers had already told her what I sought.

The paintings were purpotedly millennia old, and would have been considered crude by Everway sophisticates, but the artist had posessed skill and energy. I viewed them in reverse sequence, almost frightened of the stories' beginnings.

The last of the paintings showed human figures dancing amidst the stars.

The second to last showed these same figures opening a door from which bright energies dazzled.

The third from the last was of these same figures, as children, learning and playing in the nearby valley.

The fourth from the last showed people moving into the valley. Springs leapt from rockside and a small stream ran down the center.

And then I looked at the first in the sequence.

A giant, so huge that all above his waist was out of the scope of the painting, created the valley and its springs as his foot sank into the soft earth.

I had found what I sought.

My journey began in Roundwander, in Everway, beneath Walker's Pyramid.

I sought for the magic that made some of us spherewalkers.

I passed from sphere to sphere, following the tales of spherewalkers, the songs of bards, the poems of scops, the stories of shamans. In each place I sought where the oldest tales came from of those who could walk from one world to the next.

And on each world, the tales, the drawings, the songs, the legends, always led me to a valley or a rift.

Or a bay, such as the Shimmermoon.

On each world the spherewalkers had first come from nearby one of these places.

And on some worlds, the stories spoke of a great giant, whose footstep created the hole in the earth.

And on this sphere, ancient beyond the others I had visited, a land blighted by time and death, I found the story I had come to believe from my studies, painted thousands of summers before the time of legends.

We call him Walker in Roundwander. He has a thousand names on as many spheres. It is the mighty pressure of his footsteps that created these valleys--of that I am convinced. And something of the atmosphere of such places, made by the strength of the first of those to walk between the spheres, caused others to be born who can do the same. And these folk passed this ability down to others in their bloodline, to follow in Walker's footsteps.

Walker's Footsteps by Mark Edwards copyright © 2001 Gaslight Press. All rights reserved.