Please read In Recent Years: Introduction before reading this post.
Year 1478
On a hunt during the later months of the year, a hunter of Razaad named Arn joins the charge of his hunting band against the defensive reptiles that are so valuable to their tribe. Loklar, the chief of the hunting band, gets caught by vines over a stone precipice from which there is no way out. With no one around, Arn—true to his Razaad values—slices through the vines with his knife, sending Loklar to his death.
Arn’s murderous act shifts the balance of power in the hunting band and sends repercussions throughout the tribe living on Razaad—a remote island on the edge of the Stormy Sea. Torr, another hunter, takes over the hunting band. Arn’s friend Thalla takes him along to a spear-throwing competition. The burly leader of the tribe places near Torr’s bullseye, while Arn throws his spear off-point on purpose. From conversations with others, Arn remembers that he is not the only one that makes choices to prioritize his own deceitful and scheming rise through the cut-throat life on Razaad.
Continuing with his agenda, Arn poisons the mother of the right-hand of the hunting band, Ollinar—but he frames Thalla. When Ollinar attacks Thalla, Arn leaps into action and the duo kill Ollinar as a crowd gathers. When Torr demands why his second-in-command is dead, Arn claims he was only defending Thalla. He further earns Torr’s favour with his success on the next several hunts, though Torr makes a hunter named Crezik his new second-in-command.
Year 1479
When a shack in the village collapses, killing one of his older sisters, Arn worries he will lose his favour with his family, as his elderly mother believes it is retaliation for the death of Ollinar and Ollinar’s mother. Despite this—and due to the lack of proof—Arn is still invited to his family’s gatherings and continues to bond with his younger sister Ratha, whom he calls Little Rat in jest.
Among the tribe’s bands, Logern loses control of the fishing band in a duel against a mysterious tribesman named Taran—who supports Logern’s second-in-command surpassing his old master. Arn is then approached by the late Ollinar’s uncle, Garem. Chieftain Stone Spear owes Garem a favour, allegedly, and Garem tells Arn that he can use it to help Arn or to hurt his family. Garem demands Arn bring him poison from the hunting band’s stores. When Arn complies and demands to know what Garem’s plans are, Garem explains his scheme.
Along with a web of conspirators, Garem is arranging the deaths of each band leader: the hunters; the fishers; and the towns’ keepers, which includes seamstresses and builders alike. He asks Arn to eliminate Torr anonymously, so that Crezik can take control of the band. Crezik, Garem reveals, is a fellow conspirator.
True to his word, Arn kills Torr on the next hunt with a surprise attack and a poisoned knife. When Crezik arrives to claim Torr’s body as his kill, Arn attacks him as well—certainly not to Garem’s plan. After a rough duel, Arn kills Crezik and drags Torr’s body back to the village. Rather than keeping it anonymous, Arn drops Torr’s body at the feet of Stone Spear and alleges that it was assassins that took Torr’s life—and that Arn tried to save him. On the spot, Stone Spear appoints Arn as the leader of the hunting band and reveals that the leader of the village band was killed as well. However, unlike Garem’s plan, Logern is alive still and once again leader of the fishing band. It seems that Taran and Logern’s old second-in-command were working for him all along; they had made Logern look weak while he is—it seems—the most protected of all the bands.
Arn, exhausted, is soon besought by a furious Garem—the schemer accuses Arn of killing Torr and participating in the conspiracy in front of Stone Spear himself. A third fight ensues, and Arn barely manages to kill Garem, knocking him off the cliff near Stone Spear’s hut.
As he recovers under the care of Jorik, the village’s embalmer and healer, Arn delves into the dreamworld—a not-uncommon lucid dream for Arn. By the time he resumes control of the hunting band, weeks later, Arn’s position is far from secure. A particularly troublesome hunter named Shar publicly decries Arn’s leadership, but Arn is not yet strong enough to duel him. Nonetheless, Arn continue to command the hunters.
Finally in a position of power, Arn begins to pursue a secret goal of his own desires. Arn’s father crossed to the island nearest Razaad, Scoa, many years ago and never returned. Arn seeks to explore and exploit Scoa as he faces the fact that the animals alive on Razaad are a constant limit in the growth of the tribe. Logern, the chief fisher, refuses to share his band’s knowledge with Arn—Logern believes in the Deep, a personification of the ocean that mimics but exceeds the duplicitous treachery and danger of the tribespeople of Razaad. He tells Arn they have no business crossing it. For once, violence—killing Logern for refusing him—is not a solution to Arn’s troubles. A dead Logern would aid his venture none.
Even Jorik the Embalmer refuses to offer Arn any pointers when it comes to crossing to Scoa. Frustrated, Arn begins constructing a raft on his own, but this only further jeopardizes the loyalties of his hunters. Shar confronts Arn once more and insinuates that Thalla is managing the hunting band, not Arn, and that Arn ought to retake control from her.
Inevitably, Arn’s disaffected hunters turn on him and three of them attack him. The savage fight ends in a draw as Arn has killed two of his attackers but passes out after incapacitating Shar.
Arn drifts in the dreamworld, confused and hurt. Weeks pass as he heals in Jorik’s hut. Thalla visits Arn and tells him that she will back him no matter what—but she cannot back his attempts to reach Scoa. Even she—his closest friend—tells him it is the stuff of dreams… and Arn slips into such dreams once more. Another couple of weeks snake by, until Arn is visited by Stone Spear himself. Stone Spear strips Arn of his hunting band position altogether and then, unlike all the others, urges Arn to make the raft to Scoa work. He reveals to Arn that the Stone Spears before him have tracked the population of the tribe and the resources they have access to, and that these things are more divided than they have ever been. If they are not able to expand, Stone Spear says, the tribe will collapse for a time, or will overreach and lose the very ability to survive.
Finally strong enough to move, Arn resumes work on his raft with doubled focus and a modicum of safety, as he is now no longer trying to command a band of disloyal hunters at the same time. He repairs his relationship with Thalla, but they hesitate to take it any further as Arn’s crossing to Scoa would likely end anything they might start.
Arn finally readies his raft for a test. Using the traditional guiding pole of the fishers, he guides the raft out into the heavier waves off the shore—only to realize that his pole can no longer reach the bottom. He watches, helplessly, as Razaad drifts away, and then he turns to face the Deep. The tide takes him across the gap between islands and he watches the rocks of Scoa come closer. Too late he realizes they are hiding beneath the surface as well—the raft crashes into sharp, dark rocks, and tosses Arn into the Deep. Floundering, he is dragged across the rocks and blacks out. He awakens still being pulled this way and that by the violent tide—he is slammed against the cliffs once more, but manages to grab a higher ledge. He drags himself from the saltwater and ascends the cliffs of Scoa before collapsing, wounded and exhausted, on the land he had been told he should never have sought. Assessing his wounds, Arn realizes that his initial smash into the sharp tidal rocks has scraped his face from forehead to cheekbone, and little remains of his nose.
He faces difficult odds as he tries to heal such horrific injuries in the midst of a forest with which he is utterly unfamiliar. While surviving and trying to get on his feet again, Arn faces the dangers of Scoa: storms, wildcats that can stun with screeching bursts of noise, and even the shocking discovery that another tribe of humans lives on this island—just out of reach of those on Razaad.
Furthermore, Arn uncovers old stone ruins on Scoa. He delves deep into them, discovering a whole town—though he can scarce conceive of anything beyond a village—has sunk into the dirt and rock and sea. The dead lurk here, walking around and trying to write on rotted parchment… armed with one of their rusted metal weapons, Arn runs screaming and dreaming back to the surface of Scoa.
In the coming days, Arn works on a new raft and survives a fight with the Scoa tribe’s best fighter; then, while healing, he is nearly killed by a screecher—the name he has given to the wildcats. Managing to kill the feral beast earns him an opportunity to feed himself with good meat and clothe himself with pelts once more.
The crossing back to Razaad proves as dangerous as the first, but in a different manner. Arn’s steer-less raft almost drifts away from both isles and into the wider expanse of the Deep. Thanks to his quick thinking, Arn tears off part of the raft and devises a rudder—something his people had never thought of or needed before. He safely returns to the shore of Razaad in the morning hours of a day more than a month after his unexpected departure. He marches through the village to the hut of Stone Spear and raises the metal sword from Scoa over his head, demanding Stone Spear face him in a duel to the death. As Arn drives the blade home, they share a whisper of, “For Razaad,” and then Arn stands before his tribe as their new chieftain.
Arn’s first orders as Stone Spear are to begin work on several rafts—to cross the Deep and bring the hunt against the second tribe. Despite his new authority, Thalla refuses his personal advances due to the dangers of his leadership and the look of his deformed visage. She also asks to have him kick her off the hunting band—the only way she can step down without losing face or risking injury in a duel. Arn refuses, knowing that unchecked hunters could be his undoing as chieftain. Later, while Arn is training in the forest, Thalla finds him and lays with him—only to demand that he do what she has asked.
Year 1480
Bitter to have his only true friend now care only for his usefulness to her, Arn calls Thalla out during the next tribal gathering. He accuses her of failing to follow his orders, hoping she will offer to step down easily due to his anger. Instead, Thalla refuses his orders in front of everyone, forcing Arn to fight her to save face. When they close the distance to duel, she whispers that he should make it good so that the tribe will still respect her even if she is removed from her position. Still reeling from how Thalla treated him, stressed by the dreamworld and the dangers of his new authority, Arn loses himself in the fight and nearly kills Thalla. Looking up from her broken body, he sees Ratha—Little Rat—staring at him from the crowd in horror. In her eyes, he is no longer her big brother—he is a monster returned from the Deep.
In the days that follow the duel, Arn presides over the tribe with sour manners and a frustrated resolve. When approached by Shar—one of his greatest rivals—he refuses to hear the once-hunter out. Shar, now with a permanent limp from their past duels, begs Arn to give him a position where he can regain some usefulness to the tribe. Arn refuses, insisting Shar will remain the laughingstock of Razaad.
Two fighters confront Arn in the forest when he is training—Arn kills them both and shows them no honour. As one dies, Arn refuses to offer him ceremonial resting; instead, Arn leaves his body to the worms.
Thalla, once she has healed from the beating Arn gave her, offers Arn her forgiveness in order to play a roll in the upcoming raid on Scoa.
As Arn leaves Thalla’s hut, heading back up toward his own, he is attacked from behind—yet again. He spins, only to find that his assailant is not a hunter or devious assassin, but it is Little Rat who has attacked him. He asks her why and she tells him that she hates what he has become. He offers her no solace and sends her from his presence, shaken further and sure that he is what the others see—a foul creature.
Then, at last, the warriors of Razaad cross the Deep to Scoa. Arn warns them not to venture into the cursed ruins where he spotted living dead. The tribe of Scoa appears and challenges the best fighter face their champion—the same tactic they used against Arn. This time, Arn fears they will not fight fair and will seek to cut the head from the serpent. He allows Taran, fishing chief Logern’s best fighter, to duel in his stead. When Taran fails against the Scoa tribe’s champion, Arn finishes the wounded man off claiming he has no time for disappointments.
This proves to be the last straw. One-by-one, all of Arn’s warriors rise and claim they will duel him should he not step down. Arn, incredulous, points out that he could kill them all with his metal sword. He openly accuses those who have sent assassins after him before, and then roars that he hopes Scoa will kill them all. He storms off, with naught but his sword, and boards a raft.
Shar alone—of all those who might—follows Arn. He offers Arn supplies and companionship and asks to join his voyage, saying he, like Arn, has nothing left for him here. The two set off, this time allowing the current to take them away from both Scoa and Razaad.
They sail into the Deep. Weeks pass as their supplies dwindle. Starved and burnt by the sun, Arn is plagued by the dreamworld. He awakes one day to find Shar about to slit his own throat—a last ditch effort, from some strange place of loyalty, to help Arn survive. Shar succeeds, and Arn’s sword is lost overboard when he panics and tries to save his comrade.
Utterly alone and terribly depressed, Arn spends the next couple of weeks lying in the sun and dreaming of strange things in the sky and stranger things in the Deep. Then, to make matters even worse, Arn drifts into the dark waves of a great storm. Shar’s body is lost overboard—robbing Arn of the chance to send him into the afterlife. Then, with a horrible crack, the waves break the core of the raft and it begins to tear to pieces.
Arn washes up, against all odds, on a sandy beach, half-drowned, half-starved, and no less grisly than the bearded, scarred man that set sail from Scoa. To his disbelief, another man is stranded on the same isle—an isle no larger in its entirety than the lagoon of Razaad. Arn meets Gamden, and the two share tricks to survive as they face the bleak prospect of enduring life on the sand-bluff with its three palm trees.
Many months later, Arn and Gamden dine on their last coconut—a difficult affair despite its obvious nutritious value, given they are both suffering from scurvy. They prepare for their deaths over the next few days, until spotting a boat of some kind moving on the horizon. After flagging it down, they meet a few men who row out from it in a small rowboat. The men speak a different language, but seem to offer Arn and Gamden help.
Once aboard, Arn and Gamden take several weeks to recover, but they start helping out as soon as they can. They begin to learn the language these men speak, and soon they arrive at a great city on a new land. Arn has never seen so much land, nor a city so large. The crew take him into the town and the captain hands Arn and Gamden over to a group of guards. Arn manages to grab a weapon and, using his skills of old, he threatens to kill the man if the captain does not order them freed. The captain laughs, Arn kills the guard, only to be overpowered by the remaining guards. They drag him, kicking and screaming, to a stockade—and they press a red-hot slave brand into his back.
The next port that the captain takes Arn and Gamden to is several times larger than the city that had already impressed Arn so. It is surrounded by wooden buildings and many armed men—and the captain that rescued them sells them at a slave market here, to a Master Quenden.
Year 1481
Arn learns that Quenden wants him to become a warrior and assassin for him, and Arn agrees—the first step to scheming and rising through the ranks of Razaad. Gamden is unimpressed, preferring to resist their slavers, but Arn bonds with a fellow slave named Massema. Massema is far more learned than Arn and knows the traditions of these lands. She explains to him that this is the city of Starath, and the wooden construction surrounding it is a siege wall.
When Quenden calls on Arn to help him with a spying task, Arn refuses. He tells Quenden that this is something Gamden can do, instead of doing nothing. Quenden grows irritated and tells Arn that Gamden is not real—he’s a delusion of Arn’s own making, a figment of the dreamworld that had escaped into Arn’s waking world.
Arn doubts it at first, but soon realizes the truth. He grows confused and angry once more, realizing that he must truly be the broken man that Little Rat saw in that ring of firelight. Arn confronts Gamden and the two argue—they even come to blows. Arn chokes Gamden until Arn cannot breathe anymore…
Ignoring Gamden altogether seems to work for a while. Arn agrees to whatever tasks Quenden gives him. Finally, a larger mission is given to Arn: he is to sneak into the barracks of a warlord in the siege, Crar, the Merchant of Orm River. There, he is to deliver a secret letter that frames someone else in Crar’s eyes. Massema wishes him luck and urges him to find another way than giving into his more-violent urges.
In the barracks of Crar, Arn is caught by the guards—armored with more metal than Arn has seen any single person carry—and is brought before Crar. He watches as Gamden appears, dashes across the room, and stabs Crar in the neck. Arn is seized for the assassination, of course, and is thrown into a jail cell.
As he rots in the prison of these strange people, Arn drifts in and out of hallucinations. He explores the dreamworld, chats with Gamden, and sees a strange ray of light from the sun that is causing a circle of heat and fire to grow in the corner of the cell. The guards eventually drag Arn out of the cell and march him toward the gates of Starath itself. The city has fallen, Arn sees; the people of the city have eaten each other like madmen.
Arn is transferred to a new cell, this one cast almost entirely of metal. He laughs, still believing that metal is a curse—like the deathly ruins under Scoa—and he watches as the circle of heat begins to grow once more, a gleaming reflection of the sun that follows Arn, even when there is no sun to cast it.