Odarin the Good Wizard

Some years later...

Hiking was that time when Odarin felt absorbed and welcomed into nature, when he entered her lungs and was given a deeper sense of wonder. This is why he kept doing just that for decades. His shoes were thirsty for travel and so was his mind...and travel they did. In the greenery of the trees was the salvation of his brain, a place to rest old thoughts and gain new perspectives.

And so his footfalls became the heartbeat and his sight became a sense of wakeful dreaming, and upon the forest floor so woven with ancient tree roots came a light filtered by the bouquet of foliage above: softened, verdant and freshly aromatic.

Odarin never once cared to be back in the town he came from so many years ago or a city where he felt he just couldn’t fit in. The open road was his mistress and she delighted him with things that made him stand still in awe, made tears run from his eyes with beauty he had never seen and strong desire to distance himself from anything that required repetitious work for anyone else in this world. He was content to just drift along and take life as it came to him.

Decades of careful planning , following the stars and finding the sun with his arrival at every new destination filled him with joy and happiness. Yes...there were a few close calls in his travels but the spell of invisibility came in quite handy at times like that and he merely shuffled off in another direction as quietly as his feet would carry him in the opposite direction.

There were times when Odarin would not follow a road or pathway and simply make his way into a forest just to see and feel it under his feet. Stepping into the forest robbed you of one sense and heightened the others. It was disorientating to be almost blinded but given the ears of a wolf. Even the soft susurration of the branches felt heavy in the ears. The sense of smell was sensitized, the loam in the earth and the decomposing leaves made the atmosphere close and thick. The blackness nurtured a sense of claustrophobia inside you even though the woodland stretched unbroken for miles.

The narrow path, if there was one, was made uneven by the knotted roots that crossed it, branched at intervals. There was no map to follow, but even if there was the perpetual dark would prevent you from using it, so Odarin would reach for his staff and ignite the green crystal that perched on the very top and he could see where he was going and not alarm any forest dwellers to much of his passing by.

There were times when he was camped high in the mountains and below him he could see the glow of the towns and cities below him. In his decades of travel this occurrence was happening time and time again and it felt like he was running out of space to explore with all the nights telling him people had set up townships and cities. Once he spotted these at night he avoided them like you would a bear with a toothache.

In some areas it looked like the stars had fallen from the sky and taken up residence on the ground before him. There were many times he back tracked to avoid these places and there goings on. Odarin had added places to the same map he was using all the time since he left his town and often returned to places that he really loved. It was on one of these ‘back tracks’ he came into a spot of bother. Now apart from the usual run of the mill creatures such as birds, bears, deer, rabbits, squirrels, foxes, snakes and a huge assortment of weird and wonderful insects there was a particular species you stayed well clear of...and and that was the Goblins.

The best way to describe what they were like was to read any of the police reports in any given town or city because they were ones who caused all of the trouble except in domestic disputes. That was the one thing they never had was a fight in the family. They never disputed anything. They acted quickly and with malicious intent so there was never any disputes... only broken legs, arms and fingers.

Authors Note: I am going to give an explanation about what these little buggers were like and why they should be well steered away from at all costs. These ticking time bombs were stout, half the size of a human being, long thin fingers, they hold a grudge, have magical abilities, bright green skin, bald, fiercely loyal, arrogant, greedy, churlish, reptilian scaly skin, forked tongue, lidless eyes, quick to anger, dull witted, war-mongering, territorial, goblins tend to be annoying, mischievous, uncooperative, and obnoxious rather than truly wicked and they rarely kill humans on purpose - although exceptions to the rule exist - however, goblins aren’t above hurting people when their pranks go wrong, though they normally leave be after a while: normally a goblin simply wants to provoke a reaction rather than harm their victim. Some goblins are affable: so long as they are treated nicely and with respect they will do no harm: treat them poorly they will make humans suffer in variety of ways that are too horrible to mention. Goblins could live anywhere as long as it was sheltered from sunlight and not consecrated - although they frequented human abodes most goblins preferred to live in forests and woodland or bogs, though they seldom lived very far from humans or livestock as they found mortals a great source of entertainment. Now that I have you up to speed on what these miscreants are like let’s continue shall we...... to the next chapter!