Hark! Come! Pull up a chair and listen to a nightly tale. This story comes from across the sea, a mountainous land home to winged folk rarely seen in these parts. The noble Tori are proud of their epic ballads and songs, tales of heroism, myth, and adventure. But tonight is for a tale of another kind.
It begins with a night much like this one. The wind howls and the stars tell dark and unwelcome portents. The Tori are a superstitious clan who believe that evil pervades nights such as these, and the coming morn brought with it the tragedy of a nestmother, her life sacrificed to shelter her brood from the storm. Her efforts were in vain, as the hatchlings could not endure without their mother, save for one exception; within the nest was found a single hatchling, shivering, sickly, but very much alive. A blessed child was born.
Raised by his village, none would claim the blessed child as their own. He grew from nestling to chick to fledgling, but even as he earned his wings, he lacked the true kinship of family. He matured apart from his peers, always an outsider, and soon he came to understand the cold truth; when others called him blessed, they truly believed he was accursed.
Nobody knows why he left. Few even noticed his absence for the first few days, and fewer still kept their vigil as the days turned to weeks. In time, the village almost forgot he was ever there, and none would have guessed at his reasons for leaving. To this very day, the Tori still don't know how the outsider found Arcadia's Undoing, how he uncovered the Tomb of Nalrith and navigated the treacherous labyrinth beneath, or how he withstood the incomprehensible Harpillin Decree. Some guess that he merely had nothing to lose, that his curse compelled him to search out the deviltry of that doomed clan. Whatever his reasoning, he would forever be an outcast, exiled for flouting the direst prohibitions of the clan elders.
The Tori say that he wandered to the end of his days 'til at last madness claimed his soul, consumed by the very ancestral evil that he awoke in that forbidden ruin. But hear me, dear listeners, for I have cause to think otherwise. While on my journey to join a mercantile caravan, I met a lone figure, masked and shrouded, on a desolate stretch of road, his bearing tall and fearsome. He stopped me as I crossed his path, his sharp talons digging into my shoulder, and whispered awful, impenetrable secrets into my ear. I tried to carry onwards, to pull away, but I was petrified beyond the means. What then, you ask? Well, he let go and continued on his way. Needless to say, I ran as fast as my legs could take me, but in my hasty flight, I lost the rest of the day. It's a fool's game to travel the mountain road past dark, so I sheltered in a nearby crevasse and prayed that I could catch up to the caravan on the morrow. Come the morn, I did catch up, and sooner than expected; the caravan had barely made it a quarter-day journey past the departure before being set upon by some fell monstrosity. There were no survivors: among the wreckage, I found only the sickening realization that fate would have had me meet the same on that forsaken road, if not for my chance meeting with the Outsider.
-The last recorded performance of Rashi Lifesinger Erithyl at the Wickerman Inn