The cursed man remembered the gathering only in dreams.
Twelve seats beneath the branches of an enormous tree. A stranger rising from one of them. One eye catching the firelight.
“He shall possess courage,” the stranger said.
Another voice answered from the darkness. “Let him have cause to use it.”
“He shall prevail in battle.”
“Let each victory leave a wound.”
“Gold shall pass through his hands.”
“And never quiet his hunger.”
The stranger considered him for a long time. “Then give him poetry.”
“Let him forget what he creates.”
At this, the stranger lowered his head. When he looked up, the man thought he saw grief in the remaining eye.
Then morning came, and his life began.
He became everything they had promised.
Kings paid to have him beside them. Men repeated his verses in languages he had never learned. His name travelled further than his feet.
Each triumph left something unfinished.
At night, beneath fine linen, the old wounds ached. He would lie awake and listen to people celebrating his life in another room.
In his second lifetime, he found his name in a book older than the kingdom where he had been born.
Beside it, someone had drawn a stair descending through seven circles.
At the foot of the page stood a small figure beneath a tree. One half of its face had been rubbed away.
The city stood upon another city. Beneath its foundations lay a temple whose god had been forgotten. Beneath the temple was the stair.
He found its entrance during a storm.
Seven circles had been cut into a ruined arch. When lightning struck beyond the rooftops, he saw that their overlapping lines formed the roots of a tree.
He placed his hand against them. Within the wall, a door moved.
He descended past buried streets and roots thicker than his body.
His lamp failed. He continued by touch.
Far below the city, his fingers found words carved into the stone. He knew them.
They belonged to a poem he had spoken beside a king’s fire sixty years before. He had forgotten it by morning.
The stair opened onto a shore beneath a black sky. Across the water burned scattered fires. Their reflections shone among submerged stars.
Men waited along the shore. One wore a soldier’s torn coat. Another held a book whose pages had been washed blank. Beside them stood a man in a weathered cloak.
The traveller knew his face.
“You gave me these things,” he said. The man inclined his head.
“I have carried them through a lifetime. I have done everything I knew to do.”
The man listened. Then he drew his cloak aside. An old wound marked his body. Above it, the empty eye socket lay in shadow.
The traveller had remembered only the eye that shone.
“What is this place?”
“The Order of Cursed Men.”
“Can the curse be lifted here?”
“Mine remains.”
Across the water, a distant fire began to fail. The men turned towards it.
“Someone is losing the road,” said the man with the empty book.
The one-eyed wanderer took a lamp from the shore. A causeway appeared beneath the water as he stepped forward.
The traveller watched him go. Nobody knelt.
He waited until the lamp returned. Another man walked beside its bearer, leaning heavily upon his shoulder.
At the water’s edge, the traveller reached out and took some of the weight. Together they brought the newcomer ashore.
Overhead, a star appeared. Its answering fire burned among the others.
In time, the traveller learned the crossings.
On a road that passed through dreams, his courage steadied a frightened companion. In a darkness where landmarks vanished, a verse came to him. He spoke it as they walked, and the man beside him remembered the way.
Gold bought passage to a distant city where someone had been waiting through a long winter.
His gifts found uses he had never imagined when kings were praising them. His wounds troubled him still.
There were nights when another man carried the lamp for him.
He often met the wanderer at the water’s edge. Sometimes they spoke. Sometimes they crossed together.
Once, the traveller asked why he had given so much to men whose lives would be so difficult.
The wanderer sat beside him until the question had been fully spoken.
“I am still learning what a gift becomes,” he said.
At the next fire, a young man challenged something the wanderer had said about the northern road. The man in the weathered cloak turned his remaining eye toward him and made room on the step. They talked until the lamps needed oil.
Years later, the traveller opened the ancient book again. Beneath the drawing of the tree, he found a sentence almost lost to the darkened page.
We are all the cursed man.
Across the water, a fire flickered. He closed the book and took up his lamp.
Another lamp was already moving along the distant shore.
