The color we know as gold today was different before the Old Magic went away. Some claim that our gold is greener while the ancient color was more orange and pink, primarily a lingual shift over the millennia. But I know that isn''t true. The color was indeed peachier but it also had another quality that is hard to explain to people that haven''t seen it along with an eerie and enchanting beauty. I don''t know, I doubt we''ll ever know, if this color was merely a product of the senses of the elder men, the high men, or if the color itself has gone with the Old Magic as it drained from our world.


    When we were digging deep into the earth, into the mountain that some claim rose up over lost Aurum we found a pool, a pool filled with brilliant sapphire waters, fed from a statue of a man dressed in intricate clothes carry a jar, a jug, on his shoulder. Anyone who dipped their face beneath the surface, even those wearing sealed protective equipment was transported away to another place, and another time. Though to witnesses each person, unvariably, yanked their head from the water the instant their face was fully immersed, everyone remembered years of a life they hadn''t lived. The same life. After the 28th person the brilliant shimmer of the water was fully dimmed and it became nothing more than a fantastic decoration. Whatever resevoir of what we know know was called melltan was contained in the chamber was drained.


    I recount within these pages the life I lived, more clearly projected across the landscape of my mind than my own, of a world where men were not so equal as they are today, where the power of the many could not so easily constrain the power of the one. I ask those who read these words to recall that this was the life of the privileged few, even if the boy was thought common at the time of his birth, he was not. He was the product of the by-blow of unknown anscestors coming together in the right mixture purely by luck. He was the exception that proved the rule to the masters of the past. So far as we know, as he knows really, only 1 in 1,000 children like him could rise above their station, and it was not through any effort of their own. If you dream of travelling back, after hearing my tale, to the time of titans, and of kings, considered the odds that you would end up stepped on, like an ant beneath a man''s boot.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    Though in that golden instant, the old gold I mean, I lived fully the life of the archon, the high mage, known as Emrys ap Angharad, so named, being a commoner, due to the strength of his affinity, that of time and the mind, the affinity of the ancient Aurum queen Angharad Of The Morning, I record hear only what I consider the most interesting moments of his life. Though the ancients shit like us and slept like us I imagine the audience for such moments is small. Our theorists speculate that our memories exist as a sort layered sediment with the most banal crushed and powerdered and all mixed together while those that truly matter stand strong and hardy against the pressure. What point then to describe every little detail of every class and meal, though I remember them in perfect clarity, like the facets of a cut and shining diamond, if the audience will forget them as soon as they''ve heard them?


    In any case with the turning of the page you will be immersed, though not so deeply as I, in the life of one of those who came long before us. Though the knowledge they taught him is useless to us now, I think their methods might merit some study for our own use and the differences in their daily struggles will illuminate how similar we actually are. Perhaps then those who long for the lost days of kings might consider the things which we have, brought about by united struggle, which "high men" had not.