It is the way it has always been, thought Sir Timot as he plodded his path pulling lightly on the long leather reins of his loyal steed, Chastain, walking silently through the tall heath and briar in a part of the American North newly colonized and liberated from the British. This warrior was one of a long chain of knightly men who were sworn to fight for the goodness and grace and life of all people, to strive for peace and humanity even when such virtues seemed as forgotten as an abandoned abbey, nearly destroyed by the corrupt Church of England, so torn and dismembered that only the shell of the beautiful, graceful stone monastery stood in a remote and untrampled piece of wood known as the "Vale of the Rood" by the Celts and the Welsh who once sowed barley, milled wheat into flour, and herded sheep and strong horses trained for near-constant warfare and long rides in the cold and the rain which came from the "Sea of Gray Wind."
It seems blood and war is all this world seeks or desires, like some kind of hunger found deep in an ill-gotten abyss one wishes not to know, continued Sir Timot in silent thought, his horse following quietly, too, pausing now and then to nibble at some cow-grass growing in bunches along the path that began at the coastland of Meine as this good knight passed solemnly through the hillocks of the Green Mountains and the new shires to the west. His ancestors were from the Northland from across the great Sea of Atlantic where the sky seemed as endless as man's quest for peace and the land as green as a calm, deep lake with pine and elder and mossy fern reflected in the pure, cold water. Sir Timot was told there were others he would meet somewhere further south in a place called Philadelphia. These other good warriors were to have traveled just as far as he, from the great steppes between the Tibetan Mountains and the Gobi Desert and others from the Mountains of Carpathia, dark and desolate and, often-times, haunting. ... to be continued