The Outcast's OathThe villagers had gathered beneath the old stone archway, their torches hissing in the night rain. At the center of the circle stood Kaelen, bound by rope, his cloak in tatters. He had been judged guilty—not of theft, nor of murder, but of questioning the Elders' will. For that, exile was the sentence.
The High Elder raised his staff and spoke, voice carrying through the storm:
"Kaelen of Ashmoor, you are cast from our hearths and halls. You shall walk beyond the boundary stones, nameless, shelterless, until the end of your days. Speak your final words before the people, and be gone."
Kaelen's eyes swept over the crowd—faces he had known since childhood, now turned away. He lifted his chin, and though his voice trembled, it carried:
"You strip me of my name, but I shall carry it still.
You cast me into shadow, but I shall learn to walk by starlight.
You declare me broken, but I vow this:
No chain of fear, no crown of lies, shall ever bind me again.
By fire, by stone, by blood and by bone—
I swear the Outcast's Oath: to live free, though the world call me cursed."
For a moment, the only sound was the rain. Then the crowd parted, and the guards drove him into the wilderness.
Years passed. Tales spread in hushed whispers—of a figure who walked the borderlands, who aided the desperate, who struck against the tyrants and the slavers. Some said he had carved the words of his oath into the bark of a thousand trees. Others swore they heard him recite it before each battle, as if the vow itself gave him strength.
And so the Outcast's Oath, once spoken by a single man, became something more. Wanderers, exiles, and rebels took it for themselves. It was a promise whispered by those with nothing left but their will to endure.
In time, the people of Ashmoor forgot Kaelen's face, but not his words. For an oath, once loosed into the world, cannot be exiled.
The Outcast's Oath (Expanded)
Kaelen had left Ashmoor with nothing but his tattered cloak and a rusted dagger. The wilderness was vast, a place the villagers feared to enter, thick with bramble-choked valleys and ruins older than memory. For weeks he wandered, half-starved, haunted by the echo of the Elder's words. Yet the oath he had spoken burned within him like a coal that would not die.