The Lepus Custos - Wards of the Forgotten Paths
The Lepus Custos - Wards of the Forgotten Paths
Fog clung to the ground like a living thing, curling around roots, stones, and the broken posts of a road long abandoned. Every sane map ended miles back, but Rowan pressed on, boots sinking into the damp earth, drawn forward by a whisper he could not name.
The Forgotten Paths had that effect. The elders said these roads didn’t vanish, they hid. They shifted like drifting memory, leading wanderers through pockets of silence where even their own thoughts sounded muffled and confusion took hold. Rowan had laughed at the warnings. He wasn’t laughing now.
As his lantern sputtered. A soft thud-thud echoed through the brush. Not boots. Not hooves. but Paws. Rowan froze. From the fog stepped a figure the height of a small man, its silhouette long-eared and narrow. Ragged armour clung to it, plates etched with old sigils, each dent carrying a story no living tongue remembered. In one hand it held a shield; in the other, a sword.
Its eyes, hollow and unblinking, ancient beyond anything mankind remembers, fixed on him. A Lepus Custos. A guardian of the roads that should not be walked.
Rowan swallowed. “I’m lost,” he whispered. The Lepus-knight tilted its head, as if listening not to Rowan, but to the path itself. Then it stepped aside and pointed with its sword, guiding him back toward the world of warm light and living memory.
Rowan hurried past, but before the fog swallowed the knight again, he glanced back. Two more figures had appeared behind the first, lean shapes with torn cloaks, their armour mismatched from a dozen forgotten battles. One carried a banner stitched with a crescent moon; another bore a lantern filled with blue flame.
The Lepus Custos were not myths. They were a silent order, still patrolling the thinning borders where memory frays.