A person occupied the last of the slate steps. Covered in a monkish robe despite the heat, he sat with his forearms resting on his knees, hands hidden in the robe’s capacious sleeves. His head was completely covered by a ragged cloth sack, loosely tied about his neck. Holes were cut out for his eyes. Rips and tears too numerous to count dotted the robe’s faded brown surface, each neatly darned or patched.

He had been sitting there, unmoving, unspeaking, for a very longtime. Where his robe touched the ground it clung, matted by leaf mold. Some who passed took him for a scarecrow. Others saw the stick thinness of his limbs, the knobby shape of his joints, and decided he must be a corpse. One or two, thinking to relieve the dead fellow of his purse, approached. They saw his eyes.

Staring from the sack, the eyes were not dead, but neither did they belong to a sane or peaceful being. The whites were shining and damp, as with tears, but the corners were as dry as dust. Set in them were pupils as hard as gems. When the eyes did blink, their lids were revealed to be mottled red, without any lashes at all.

Upon beholding those eyes, the would-be scavengers fled, calling on long-ignored gods for protection. Word spread that the lonely, ancient path was haunted. It was said the spirit of a murdered priest kept watch at the slate stairs, a man doomed by an unknown transgression never to rest. Soon enough, those few who trod the forest path abandoned it, finding other ways to their destinations. The trail had never been a popular one. It came from no place special and led nowhere worth going.

The one they feared no longer knew how many days he had sat there, enveloped by a stillness only the ignorant could mistake for tranquility. Neither man nor ghost, he was an elf. Silent and immobile as he appeared to the world, his mind was a maelstrom, boiling with memories of the journey that had brought him there.