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___I look forward thirty years and more, beloved.
___Beneath a summer sky, a caravan carefully wends its way, curving gently around green hills, northward.
___Every night its leader, Khase Sage, consulted maps; some as old as he, others far more ancient, a couple drawn more recently by scouts or curious locals hewing their livelihood here along the edge of the dangerous Middlelands. He also wrote, comparing notes from earlier travels, grading and compiling sources. When a work had satisfied him, he would pen it in his Chronicle. Along with Khase acolytes traveled: quick riding, lightly armed, these young men and women made their copies of his work and carried finished entries back along the trail, to any near Orthogoni; returning once again, to serve their master.
___Eventually, the caravan arrived: entering in between tall ridges of a certain tree-filled valley. Khase, standing in this southern gap, looked north: higher ridges clasped the valley east and west; snowcapped mountains crowned it to the north.
___The sage could barely sleep that night. Another bit of data, for the sake of his completeness, lay within a walking reach.
___A beaten trail led through the southern pass…and here, a site of some brigade’s encampment: rusted metal fragments and some charcoaled pits attested this.
___The aging man strode northward through the trees. Yes, he saw, honey trees grew thickly in this area, and showed the scars of tapping long ago for syrupy sap. A wide stream flowed, down and north nearby.
___It ended in a lake.
___The caravan commander walked up next to Khase Sage, and whistled in commiseration.
___“Sorry, Exemplar. We came out all this way, ‘n’ everything looked all right. But, I suppose it’s a bust.”
___“Not true, Commander!” Khase’s voice rang piercing bright, very fitted for a lecture hall. He stood with fists upon his hips, and smiled in satisfaction. “I expected this precisely!”
___“But…this here’s a lake!”
___“Yes; and the maps all told us we would find a lake, did they not?”
___“Well…yeah, I guess they did. It’s just…I thought…It’s not a lake in th’ stories!”
___“Yet the Journal and the Testimony clearly indicate that it had been a lake!—one that Qarfax probably renovated for himself.”
___“Oh. I s’ppose they do say that, now that I think about it…But, why would it be a lake again?”
___“Send your men to bring our skiff from its wagon, good Commander, and together we may find the answer.”
___“Hm.” He gave the order to a yeoman. “I thought you might be usin’ that to, I dunno, go down a river or somethin’. Guess I didn’t put th’ pieces t’gether.” The senior officer paced back up the nearby river edge while waiting. Khase joined him.
___“What do you see?” asked the sage, teasing with an edge of expectation.
___The soldier snapped his fingers. “Th’ lake is backin’ up the river, from th’ water pressure. There’s dead grass under th’ water here!”
___“Very good eye, Commander Trent! And so this also tells us—what?”
___“Th’ stream was once a lot less wide—b’cause it used to drain out fast! It wasn’t bein’ backed up by th’ lake.”
___“Exactly.”
___“Although,” Trent mused, “I woulda thought th’ grass’d be long gone by now.”
___“As usual, Commander, your good eye has found a detail of importance,” Khase sincerely said; though also with amusement in his own eyes at his joke. “Yet the grass is dead. So, when did the lake fill up?”
___“Over years. It reached its current level years ago, backin’ up th’ river then, but not b’fore.”
___“Which means, there have been changes in the water level, fitting with a significant incline beginning here along the present water’s edge.”
___Trent whistled once again. “But…the books do say the lake was here originally, ‘fore Qarfax came…assumin’ this here is th’ spot.”
___“Good man!” Khase laughed. “Best to not assume ahead of verifying. That is why we brought the skiff! Go on,” he urged his friend.
___“So, why’s there grass here now? I mean, back then? Qarfax woulda found th’ river here when he arrived to build his tower, right?”
___“Very, very good,” agreed the sage. “Observe these rocks and ledges: they smoothly fit the river’s shape, and so they must have been eroded by it—which takes time. Yet the river only recently became this wide, as shown by this dead grass beneath the water, as you found. When Qarfax made his changes to the lake, he would have left a muddy swath behind: you’re quite correct. But!—grass grows faster on rich mud, than it decays within a fishless river!”
___Trent scratched his head. “‘s gone by me, Exemplar…Though yer right about the fish. There ain’t no minnows, even.”
___“You did quite well, Commander. I myself had not considered how important dead grass underwater here would be for validation.”
___The soldier nodded at this compliment. Minutes later, other troops arrived and quickly got the small boat ready for deployment.
___“Come along, Commander!” Khase hopped into the skiff. “Let us find the answer to your mystery!” Trent gauged by eye the sage’s fitness—the other man was twenty years his senior—but after all, the skiff could only hold two men. Trent decided he could row, if the sage became exhausted; and besides, he wondered what the sage was hinting they would find.
___“I am glad the water is so clear,” said Khase as they smoothly skimmed across the surface.
___“Even so, I sure can’t say that I’m seeing much, Exemplar.”
___“Not surprising,” grunted Khase as he rowed. “The Emerald Army probably left some traces of their camp, but I doubt that we could see those traces from this height above the dell—sloping deeper down below us, if we have located Qarfax Valley.”
___“Then what’re we doin’ here, Exem…?” Trent’s voice trailed away.
___“Eh?” Khase shipped his oar. The officer had also ceased to row, and now was peering down into the lake with his good eye. “Tell me what you see, Commander,” Khase grinned.
___“A floggin’ massive pile o’ rocks…” the soldier’s voice was hushed in awe. He looked around to ascertain where it was lying underneath them. “I…I hadn’t thought it out, I guess…”
___“It can be somewhat difficult, to keep in mind the implications of the story: how the pieces fit together. Even sages have that problem; which is why we go to look.” Khase mopped his brow while carefully leaning above his own skiff-side. “There should be, not a tower, but the ruins of a tower, under the middle of a lake, which until recently was not a lake, yet once had been a lake before! And, here we are.”
___While Khase studied all the shapes below, Commander Trent looked up from deep-drowned stones, to all directions round: the lake, the distant wooded ridges, the northern mountaintops—he saw the mouths of two more rivers pouring through the trees.
___And he knew—he simply knew—that even though he couldn’t see it, there would be an eastern river. He could reason out exactly where to look, and didn’t doubt that he would find it.
___But, he would go look; to consummate his reasoning. And he knew how he would feel when he had found it:
___Like a sage.
___Like a child.

___“It’s like…like bein’ in a legend,” whispered Trent. “Like I could touch it. Like it’s touchin’ me.”
___“Legends are our history, Commander. Legends touch us every waking hour, and within our dreams as well. That is why we should respect them—and remember them,” Khase added, with a gentle criticism.
___“Rotten blood…” Trent felt a tear rolling down his face.
___For several minutes they stared into the water, with an oar-push on occasion to ensure a better view.
___“It’s kinda like we’re flyin’ over history…or somethin’. Here we are; perched up in th’ sky—’cause back in that day this’d’ve been the sky—lookin’ down on where those people fought an’ died, an’ where those monsters almost killed ‘em all. And Jian’s down there, just a speck beside those things…but he’s laughin’ at ‘em anyway, not carin’ they were gonna bury him—’cause he was busy doin’ what he always did, for her…”
___“Thank you, Commander.”
___Trent looked up, suspecting mockery: but—Khase Sage Exemplar bowed to him most seriously. “That is how I should have been considering the remnants we are floating far above. Instead—I am ashamed: for I was only feeling bitter that I cannot go myself to see.” He sighed, and looked again. And then he smiled. “I believe I almost see Commander Seifas down there, too…”
___“When yer ready, Exemplar, let’s pull on over to th’ eastern lakeside.”
___“A capital idea! I wish to seek for something there, for validation!”
___“Th’ river mouth, perhaps?”
___“I hadn’t thought of that; but, you are right, that also would be worth the trip. No, Commander Trent; I was thinking: if we have located Qarfax Valley, we also should discover some significant remains of fallen timber in the southeast quarter. And the final river mouth should be just north of that direction, too! Shall we look?”
___“At once, Exemplar!”
___Off they struck, across the lake again.
___“You should be a Sage, Commander Trent! I see you have an eye for it!”
___The one-eyed soldier laughed, at the joke and at the expectation of another link with history, of being touched by legends.
___“Too old to start that now; but, I b’lieve I’ll tag along with you awhile!”

Next chapter

Notes from the real author…

So begins the fourth and almost longest Section of chapters in CoJ, “Complications”. (The final Section is slightly longer, much of it being dedicated to the Macro-Fight Sequence. Which by the way starts about halfway through the Section after this one, just for relative referencing.)

While I don’t do much with Khase Sage compared to the other characters, he serves some important foreshadowing functions, as well as giving the Preface Author clues about how minor characters in the story regard the events going on around them. Not that the PA needs Khase Sage or any other author exactly, as for reasons I haven’t revealed he can scan spacetime thoroughly and even mentally with some limitations. Thus embodying what authors call “limited narrative omniscience” by the way. But as he noted in his Preface he’s respecting their history by using their own historical sources as much as possible; and Khase represents respect for history himself.

I’ll admit I only started plotting out Khase’s narrative (and backstory) once I began working on Book 2; until then I was making him up as I went along, and giving him things to do in foreshadowing main plot points. Here at the start of Section Four, I realized we hadn’t seen anything of Khase since his brief introduction, and I wanted to foreshadow some things that would happen later, so I took a little break from the main narrative to bring him back in and give him a “Watson” to work along with. But then, as I suspected I might, I had a lot of fun writing Khase (and Trent) in his investigations: back when I was a little boy, being an archaeological investigator (and someone who studied stories) was what I wanted to do when I grew up! (I already mentioned, back in the commentary for his introductory chapter, that Khase is the only character named after me, right? Jason = Chase = Khase.)

By now I had long since worked out the shape of how the rest of the book was going to go (although many details still remained to be invented and filled in), so I never had to go back and adjust Khase’s discoveries here much–just some minor tweaking about how he puts details together when I thought the logic didn’t quite add up right yet.

If I recall correctly this is the last time we’ll see Khase in the first half of the book; but he has a highly emotional and meaningful set of chapters later in the second half when interviewing minor characters about the big fight coming up. Tears seriously used to run down my face when I read those chapters for the first several years after I composed them; I still today can’t read those chapters without tearing up a little. Naturally I’m sentimental about my own novel, so I don’t expect other people to necessarily have the same emotional reactions. But I’m glad that I’ve been able to give Khase colorful things to do and to discover in each book so far. He may technically be a disposable character–the story doesn’t rely on him anywhere–but in a way that gives me more leeway to enjoy writing him.

No doubt he’d be the very first casualty of a film adaptation, and for good reasons. But he should be a tough if necessary sacrifice to make for sake of production and running time.

(The Preface Author would no doubt be the very next casualty, but he’s vastly more important to the overarching storyline. Just not directly to the first several books worth of story, so as long as producers committed to filming only the first three or six books, leaving him out wouldn’t be a problem.)