The Hunters of Words

After reading The Fellowship of the Ring (and listening to the awesome audiobook narrated by Phil Dragash), I’ve rediscovered Tolkien. I had read it in Spanish years ago, but in English it feels like a completely different world.

Now I’m trying to rewrite the prologue of El infinito en un junco in Tolkien’s style.

Let’s go!

The Hunters of Words

Across the stony paths of ancient Greece, mysterious riders move beneath the weary sun. Cloaked in dust and silence, they pass through fields where peasants pause at the doors of their huts, watching with wary eyes. For they know that men who travel alone are seldom harmless — soldiers, mercenaries, and traders of flesh. And so the farmers frown, mutter beneath their breath, and wait until the strangers fade again into the trembling haze of the horizon. They do not trust armed men who wander without a banner.

The riders heed them not. For many months they have climbed mountains veiled in mist, crossed valleys carved by forgotten rivers, and sailed through island chains scattered like jewels upon the sea. Their limbs have grown hard, their faces weathered, their will sharpened by a single, secret purpose — a task set upon them by a distant king. They ride through lands restless with war, hunting a prey unlike any other: silent, cunning, and without footprint.

It looks like drawings, but within each letter, there are voices. Every page is an infinite box of echoes.

Were these shadowed emissaries to rest for a night in some harbor tavern — to drink dark wine, to speak of what they have seen, to laugh as sailors do — they could fill a hundred evenings with their tales. But they do not. They are cautious men, and their stories are heavy with peril. They have crossed fields ravaged by plague and cities consumed by fire. They have seen the black ash of rebellion drift like snow, and the cruelty of men unbound by law.

With no map to guide them, they have wandered for days beneath pitiless skies, their throats dry as bone, their minds adrift in fevered light. They have drunk foul water and paid for it in agony. Their mules have sunk to their flanks in the mire, and with curses and broken hands they have dragged them free. Many nights they have slept upon the bare earth, cloaked only in rags, with scorpions for company and fear for fire. The bite of lice, the whisper of blades in the dark, the cold certainty that death might be waiting behind the next hill — these have become their constant companions.

And yet they ride on.

For their burden is precious beyond gold, and their mission more perilous than any battle. The King of Egypt himself has trusted them with his treasure and his will. In the age that followed Alexander’s fall, to carry such wealth across the world was folly — almost suicide. But still the Pharaoh commands it. Across deserts and seas he sends his secret hunters, burning with a feverish desire for the prize they seek.

Not beasts. Not men.

But words — fragile, eternal, and worth dying for.

The inert letters of the alphabet awaken meaning in our minds. Reading and writing reshape the very architecture of our brains.