She ate what hermits eat, locust and honey, weeds and flowers, fruit and fish. She hunted with her sword, facing off against mountain goats, bears, wild cats, badgers. Those she assassinated for the Alliance rarely had a chance to fight back, but these creatures were cunning and fast and fought to the death every time. Her style of engagement became more calculated than ever, seeing that the fierceness in creatures was a mask of fear. While they pounced, she analyzed and then in the last instant struck with accuracy—one thrust of the blade to let the fear out.
Her dagger trimmed the hide from the meat, which she wrapped in an animal skin and dragged back to her cave. There she had fire and fresh clothes she stole on raids of Camiar’s clothes lines. At night she read her only book, The Consolation of the Constellations, by the light of a lantern that cast a silhouette of an ibis on the wall of the cave. When reading wouldn’t do, she worked through her imagination to create a thought form servant like the one mentioned by her dream witch.
When she finally climbed into her sleeping bag nestled upon willow branches, let the fire burn low, and closed her eyes, she always wondered who it was who’d cast the dart that day she’d gone to kill ‘the witch’. She wondered if there’d ever been such a sorceress as the crone of Aer or if the whole thing had been an ambush. Since she wasn’t killed, she believed that perhaps a larger spell had been cast that might strike a blow against the Alliance and remove her deadly art from the covert war between the powerful and the people. The longer she stayed away from Camiar, the more she considered that dart an act of kindness.
In spring of her second year in the mountains, while chasing down a stag, she followed the creature into a place she’d never been before. It led her down a canyon as wide as an alley to the floor of a gorge. There, things opened up to a vast mudflat shadowed by 300 foot vertical walls of granite. She looked up and saw the blue sky over the rim of the cliffs and the sight of it made her cold. In an instant, she felt that the place was haunted and she turned to flee. It was then that she noticed the bodies, lying here and there, dressed in finery, decomposing in the mud. They were badly broken, limbs in odd twisted positions, obviously having fallen from the cliffs.
Seeing the manner in which the corpses were dressed, she remembered from her days with the Alliance having heard of a place in the mountains where people were coaxed to commit suicide by leaping to their deaths. The natural setting of the gorge was staggeringly beautiful, and so the secret council gave some of their victims the choice—either -I- could come for them or they could willingly take the plunge at Churnington’s Gorge surrounded by nature and with a modicum of dignity. When she realized who the dead were, she rifled their pockets and took the mink coat of a recent arrival. Her fear of spirits was strong every second she delayed to pillage them, and eventually she left behind a string of pearls she easily could have had and ran, heart pounding, back through the narrow canyon.
That night, lying in the cave, the fire burning low, -I- remembered looking up to the cliffs and seeing that sliver of blue sky. With that image in mind, she had an idea that wealthy people about to jump might leave something behind for the world to remember them by. She daydreamed a large man in a violet suit, brandishing a cane, leaving behind a short stack of books before stepping over the side, and realized she would go there, to the top of the gorge, and see what treasures could be found.
The journey was arduous, the trail leading over a mountain and then a descent to the plateau that ended at Churnington’s. What she found at the edge of the cliff was a small boy, sitting, staring out at the afternoon sun. In his pocket, she found a note that read, “I am Ismet Toler.” She judged him to be three years old. When she leaned down to him and reached out her hand, he took it. “Come,” she said, and led him back to the cave where she raised him.
Little is known about Toler’s younger years. Although there are many opinions about what kind of mother -I- made for the boy, or what kinds of qualities he’d carried over from the poor soul who’d chosen to leap to his doom, there exists no proof for any of it. The only verifiable record from this time was a letter written by a sixteen year old Toler to himself about his training in swordsmanship. There were cadavers dragged from the gorge and strapped to the trunks of trees or hung by a rope from a branch—life-like dummies on which one could practice the precise arc and velocity necessary to slice the heel tendon of a large man. There was dance. There were acrobatics and contemplation. About sparring with -I-, he confessed to himself, he couldn’t conceive of victory.
The only other verifiable incident from Toler’s youth was related to me by Lady Etmisler, who had heard it from the Coral Heart, himself, at a banquet they’d both attended in the palace at Camiar. He told her that when he became masterful with the sword, -I- told him that he’d reached the second of three levels of development. She told him to leave the cave and go out in the world and ply his trade. He wanted to know when his new training would begin, and she told him, “In five years, you can return to me if by then you’ve renounced the sword. We can only continue if you forsake it.”
That night she told him the story of how she came to the mountains and discovered him on the ledge at Churnington’s Gorge. In the morning, he kissed her goodbye, and she told him that at the end of five years, she would send a thought form servant to him to ask if he’d renounced the sword and was returning. He nodded as he walked away, his sword upon his back. In the valley of the known world, he soon found employment as a bodyguard to a corrupt bishop who was often the target of assassination attempts. From there his reputation as a swordsman grew. He moved on to work as a mercenary and fought for the side that paid the most in any conflict, often changing sides in mid-battle for the promise of better. By his fourth year away from the mountains, Ismet Toler was a name to be reckoned with.
But as that fourth year drew to a close, after proving the effectiveness of his blade, he felt he’d had enough of slaughter. The disfigurement of his victims’ bodies, the blood and severed flesh, had become nauseating to him. It was all too much of the same gore, and he felt a need to move on to the next level. His diary from this time proves he was on the verge of renouncing the sword and returning to -I-. For the remaining months of the year, he decided to leave his position, training assassins for the Igridot royalty, and head for Camiar, where he would rent rooms, live off the spoils of his killing, and wait for -I-’s servant to appear.
In that brief space of days that he travelled north on the road to Camiar, Fate in all its bad timing and low humor, stepped in, and he somewhere, somehow, acquired the Coral Heart, the blade, whose magical properties would eventually make him a legend. Toler swore to never reveal how he came by it, and so this crucial juncture in the story is blank. I constantly comb the valley of the known world for clues to those few days he spent retreating along that road, and have found nothing. I could spin a fanciful tale, but instead, I merely direct you to where the trail of known fact resumes.
By the time Toler entered the city, he’d already turned to red coral a band of highwaymen who’d foolishly tried to rob him and take his horse. It was the trio of palace guard, though, who confronted him in the market place at Camiar and wound up red statues of their former selves that caused the trouble. He knew he would have to flee. Learning the feel of the sword, he was eager to use it, but he’d not yet mastered its extra weight, or reckoned the sharpness or balance to the point where he could defeat the entirety of the royal guard of the palace of Camiar. He left the city by night as door to door torchlight searches for him were being conducted. There had been witnesses.