I was given a prophecy by the Oracle at Delphi, long before the birth of your Christ-child. She said I would be a soldier, and that I could not die until four things had happened. The first was finding "a mountain to the west." Do you have any idea how many mountains there are to the west of Delphi?

I do.

As the years and centuries passed, I searched, and fought, and searched again. Not knowing how I would know which mountain was the right mountain, but somehow certain I would know.

I exhausted Europe. The British Isles. Iceland, Greenland, eastern Canada. Down into America around the time she was born, and there I found...my mountain. I made it my home. I left only when I was called to battle, for my new country, for others. I survived, of course. Came back to wait for the next call. Wondered, too, as I fought, and lived, and waited...when the second, and third, and fourth would happen. Wondered, too, sometimes, when the millennia made a world's weight on shaking Atlas shoulders, if the right word was actually "if."

And then I met him. July 12, 1912. I was so very sure....

This is my story, and the story of my kin in the village-town, and in the homes and farms grain-scattered around my mountain, though not blood kin, for I never married. How could I? My story, told by the man whose life was intertwined so closely with mine for a time.

Nikolai

10,737 words of actual story text.

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