Now this is a strange thing. I am not sure of its provenance. Certainly the hand bears little resemblance to my Master's but it was not unknown for him to dictate to a scribe, and I have seen hands I know to be his that were made under the influence of Those from Outside, which were ofttimes very different too. I include it here because so little is known of Korbhen's origins, so that any tale, true or no, furnishes us with the knowledge we lack.
-≈-
Of my birth and early life nothing now matters. It was entirely provincial, and it was no doubt expected that I would labour, love, and perish in much the manner of my forebears. No, my true birth was at the hands of he who inducted me into the Greater and Lesser Lores of Middle Earth. I knew him as Mauglhoth1 Hoarmaster, Fimbulþegn, and in less fraught times, "Old Bear". That latter name was well earnt. He was, in truth, a great bear of a man, broad-shouldered with black hair that covered him like a tangled briar. I have often wondered if the Old Bear was one of the Beornings, or perhaps one of the wildmen of the North from whom they are said to descend.
Old Bear had learnt of the Art from one of the Sorcerers of the Angmarim, but had - he always maintained - turned from the sure destruction in the service of the Enemy, and even then barely with his life. There were times when he could be as cruel as the wind from the Northern Waste, but more often his anger was purposed to instill discipline, and his words were sharp as a result of wit rather than malice. Still, it was impossible to escape the feeling that the Old Bear was always looking over his shoulder. Near the end of my tutelage, he spoke to me of an end "long put off, but swift arriving". From what I could glean, he was convinced that in some way his early service in Angmar had sealed his fate, despite his later rejection of the Enemy. In many ways, I think he pursued the Art with a greater zeal in the hope that he might find some way out from the destiny he feared, never quite able to evade the possibility that it was in fact his continued pursuit of Deep Lore that made that destiny certain.
A soul, torn in two.
For a time I dwelt in the house of my master in the North Downs. It was little more than a patched-up farmstead, abandoned, perhaps, in the threat of roaming orcs that were seen from time-to-time travelling towards Angmar. On the edge of the forest of Annundir, a little way from the main track, it was far enough removed from civilization to afford privacy, but close enough that I or Old Bear's other acolyte, Bharen, could walk the three miles or so to buy milk and barley from the farms in Kingsfell.
I shall not say I remember those times fondly, for they were often filled with great boredom, punctuated by the monotony and hard labour of the chores Bharen and I were obliged to carry out in exchange for the Old Bear's knowledge. Many nights, we would do little else but endure his glowering face in the hearth-light, for it was often that he would be consumed with a dark mood.
But it was a price we were both willing to pay. On other nights, when no moon shone down, our master would open his mind, and take from within his faded jacket the heavy black key to the iron-pitted lock of his Book. On those nights, we learnt to accept the dread chill that would seep in, undiminished by any fire, no matter how hard we stoked it. We learnt - in time - to ignore the strange noises that would echo from outside the walls, and came to understand the severity with which Old Bear insisted the preparatory signs and wards against Powers were made for our protection.
And oh! The things we learnt! The names of Regret, the words of dancing flame, and the thousand things that draw a Corpse-Light. How to speak in the whispers of crows, or what the worms dream.2 Each new mystery unfurled merely deepened our desire to learn more, until the truth seemed little more than a corpse to dissect and so lay bare all the secrets of the world.
Such arrogance. The Old Bear would chide us with blunt words and cudgelled hands, but we never truly believed he meant it: we thought he was merely going though the motions of discipline.
((Under Construction))
