Zanagard
Legacy Name: Zanagard

In a tiny, one room abode made of adobe brick, searing desert air is the stead of a lone pariah and his flock. On the outskirts of civilization yet only a mere stone's throw from the busiest marketplace on the continent, the single male preferred the solitude of starlight nights and the low bleat of a sheep to the bustle of the town hub with screeching vendors, calling merchants, and the stench of a thousand unwashed, undernourished orphans scrounging to get a mere morsel of bread. Over looking these lives is this lone shepherd and his flock of a most curious breed. While the natural image of a sheep brings to mind a fluffed up white puff ball, these four legged nomads were lean, sinew creatures with spiraled horns, fierce attitudes, and a soft fleece that was more coarse than the everyday person would not tolerate. It was not their production but their company that the shepherd valued.

Charms of bone and shell dangled across the opening of the adobe roof, mixing music with the natural rhythm of the dessert as winds and sands swept across the barren lands. Smiling to himself, wrapped in the dusty brown and tan of loose fitting and badly worn decor of the dunes, the shepherd swept his gaze across the lands to stare in a longing manner at the village that was but a mere twinkle on the horizon - sunlight reflecting off the many wondrous and joyful yet sordid and horrid wonders and terrors of the town lifestyle. The morning was the perfect time for a reflection of the past and present - the future too far off to even ponder upon - and the memories of a life long since lost in the manner that words where ripped free in a sand storm echoed through the hollow, wide spread dessert in a masterpiece of silence and pain.

"And you begin to wonder why you came to this..." whispered the single creature as the light from a twin sun caught and held in the silver rivulet of jewelry adorning an ear that dared to peek free from its coverings. "Now lower your voice and become one with the winds..." continued the soft, harshly brittle voice that cracked from many a year of disuse and talking in conditions brutal for even a natural dessert dweller to ascertain the true aura of that once sweet baritone.

Bleating of a sheep, a lamb lost in the herd from its mother reached the shepherd's ears, he turned only slightly, the hand holding the worn wood staff with its many decorations jingling with the barest of motions as the silence of dessert engulfed the present. Understand that you are never alone... Sinister, serpentine like and with a whisper of the harsh nature of disease and disaster crept through the shepherd's head even as the charms on the staff - for a brief moment - took on the glow of a celestial light.