Found:
A mystery!
Rangers.
Minas Vrun is an interesting little place. It was once a larger city, so the tales go, stretching across these hills on the road to Fornost and served as one of the bastions of the North Downs. Betrayal from within brought about its downfall, opening the way for Angmars forces to march on against Fornost and ultimately bring that great fortress to its knees. There's little left here now. It's not a part of the quaintly named Dead Man's Dike, not subject to the same fearful superstitions as its larger sister city. It lacks the presence of angry wildlife and empty-eyed spirits. Instead, it is open to the sky, the crumbling stones left to rot in the open for any and all to pick over.
Unless you ask the Rangers, of course.
Two of those vultures arrived only an hour or so after I did. I was just getting into the mystery of the statue when they decided to accost me. Naturally, they pointed out the oddity of someone being in such a place and, with the same breath, asked after my reasons! I can never decide if it amuses or annoys me when people do that. After all, if my presence is strange and questionable, then what of theirs? They can hardly claim to be in the right with me in the wrong if they are in the same place as I. Twits!
They even had the audacity to claim that they had been asked by the local people to watch over and protect the stones, citing them as a learning place for the youngsters. Absolute and glaringly obvious rubbish! The local men and women are farmers; people too concerned with the lay of the fields and the laborious work involved in their day to day lives to give even a single hoot about the crumbling pile of rocks atop the hill! It's highly unlikely that any of them read let alone turn their thoughts to the "glory days" of yore. Pfah! Truth be told, more than one of those farmhouses will have their foundation built from stones pilfered from this very place! A requirement for efficiency would have ensured that they take the ready cut and dressed bricks left behind yet oh so close rather than spend time, effort and money on hewing more from more distant quarries.
These men, these Rangers, so wrapped up in addled claims to places their ancestors abandoned a millennia ago, quite fail to see that their jealous guarding of the rubble serves no real purpose beyond making lives more difficult in the now.
Oh, they whine and complain that their "recovery" and "reclamation" of their "ancestral homes" is made more difficult by people like me, that all their "important" relics are taken and scattered to the winds by the greedy. They do not stop to think that if any of these places or items were deemed important by the dead men they pretend to revere, then these places would not be in such a condition and those things would have long since been moved to more secure repositories instead of being left in the ground to rot and break.
This place in particular is far beyond reclaiming. If they were to settle in this exact spot again, then they would first need to remove the skeletal structures still clinging to the land and rebuild the place from the foundations up! Doing so would render their points moot. It would no longer be a reclamation or rebuilding job but a complete and total replacement.
Tiresome blowhards.
After some vague warnings about being watched and the subsequent glaring I received over the next hour - quite distracting me from the mystery I had resolved to solve - I decided to have a little fun at their expense. Whilst one wandered off to have a poke around elsewhere in the ruins (probably at my camp and belongings. Steel wouldn't have taken kindly to that!) I turned my attention to the other. Yolanda, she called herself. A shy little thing but quite pretty once one looks past her scars. It didn't take much to make her cheeks flush like the sky at sunrise, nor much to anger Holton when he returned. Veiled threats and demands ensued, of course but that was easily diverted with a few carefully chosen truths.
The third of their ilk was much more reasonable and far less prone to the liberal - and inexpert - spreading of verbal manure. He was older, I think, less zealous and possessive.
The statue and the stone, fascinating as they are, I have left to the perusal of these men and women. If my suspicions concerning them are correct, then I lack the time to see this enigma solved. If they are even half as zealous about finding their past as they claim, then they will solve the riddle for me now that I have pointed them in what I believe to be the right direction.
Regardless, my path leads me south once more.
