[dplax]

It was by the light of the small fire that Fuorlan finally withdrew the contents of the pouch. Two bronze coins, old, older by far than him and a small, oval-shaped vial. The vial could wait. What it represented and what it contained were not considered lightly.
The coins were of different make and era. If not for the same motif on the back they could have been considered from two different times, or two kingdoms. One of the coins was almost flawless as though it had never seen use during the centuries since it had been minted, and the other, the more recent one, barely a century old was badly worn at the edges. Both bore the mark of the empire of Derul, a kingdom destroyed by a barbaric invasion almost a century ago.
How they had gotten into the possession of a priest of Sellor was a mystery likely never to be solved. The fact that the priest had actually kept the coins was even more of a mystery. Derul had never been known of its love for Sellor and her acolytes.

The plumed full helm had been withdrawn, revealing skin the hue of ebony. A pipe rested among parched lips, basking the face in a soft orange glow. The hair and beard were equally unkempt and facial hair sprawled in every possible way. The eyes were as black as the face framing them.
More than one scar gave solemn evidence to battles in years past, the biggest of them crossing from left ear to right eye. The blow must have come close to taking the left eye with it.
It was never easy to tell the age of those from the sun-baked lands of the south, but if one were to hasard a guess the warrior's age would have been in the late forties. Few knew that he was barely past his thirtieth year. Time and his profession had not been kind to him and the years weighed heavily on him.

Fuorlan sighed and put down the pipe. His journey had been long and arduous and, it now seemed, futile. War had swept across this part of the world and held it in its grip. War was where he flourished, what he had been born to, yet it was the last thing that he desired. All he had wanted when he had set out on his journey was to find peace, an existence away from...away from a life he did not want to remember.
Yet here he was, in a world so unlike his own and humans were still the same.

His father had been the ruler of his small desert tribe, content with the pitiful existence they had lived in, raising a herd of camels in the desert, moving from oasis to oasis. Greed and betrayal had changed all that, and by the age of seven Fuorlan had been orphaned and lived in the city of Akkarta as a slave to a rich merchant.

Ever to this day he thought back to those first years, the camel dung fires he used to sit around, listening to his father's stories along with his twin sister. No...he did not want to think of the past, the past was too painful.
"So, Sandstorm, what do you think?" he asked, directing the question at the horse, who by now was sleeping a dozen feet away. "What should a man like me do with his life?"
It was a question he had asked himself many times over the last few months as he crossed mountain ranges, forests and rivers, running from a past he did not want to relive. He had no answer.
He put down the coins and lifted up the vial. On a first glance it seemed to contain nothing. Yet, even as he had gotten near to the corpse of the unfortunate priest, Fuorlan had known that there was something that was much more.
Rumour had it that upon dying and ascending to the pantheon of gods, the woman who became known as Sellor, goddess of joy and healing, had breathed a last breath that a young thief, once her lover enclosed her last breath in a vial. As all rumour and all legends, this one also had a grain of truth in it. Whether the vial actually contained a goddess' breath or not was actually irrelevant, the fact was that Sellor's Breath, as the relic was known, was one of the most powerful healing artifacts ever known.
It was supposed to heal any wounds the wearer suffered instantly. But then, how had the priest died? Something felt terribly wrong...