"Svihák! Come on, you lazy child!" A young man yelled as he approached little Etele, barely ten years old, with thundering steps.
"I'm not going!" The boy, who was just scribbling something in the dust with a stick, jumped to his feet. Now, however, he left everything there as if his life had depended on it in order to get as far away from the young man who addressed him as possible.
"Don't be like that! It will be funny!" The young man waved after him.
"No! No! No!" The boy screamed.
"Good morning, Etele!" One of the residents of the yurt village smiled at him.
"Good morning, Aunty Susa!" The boy waved, but he was already running on.
"Good morning, Töme!" The lady giggled at the sight of the man running towards her.
"Good morning, Aunty Susa!" The young man greeted her.
"He doesn't want to listen to you again?" The woman shouted after the running man.
"Just the usual! Don't worry Aunty Susa! I'm about to catch him!" The young man grinned as he ran back a few steps to see the woman, then turned around and sped up. "Svihák for the love of the forefathers, stop now!" He yelled, but the young man didn't listen to him.
"No way, I'm stopping!" The little boy screamed and made a sharp turn.
"Got you!" The older one cooed after many minutes, as he caught little Etele at the grab bar. "Seriously, why do you always play this? You have to study if you want to be a good táltos of our village." Töme shook his head and tried to calm his breathing. And little Etele started to hobble.
"I don't want to be a táltos! I don't want to die early!" He hissed.
"These two have nothing..." The older boy began.
"Do not lie!" The child suddenly froze and his hands clenched into fists.
"I'm sorry, kid, come on." He lead the boy back to the yurt intended for the táltos.
Life here on the endless steppes was pretty monotonous. The villages traveled with the flocks, season after season, on a route that had been followed since ancient times. Each village had a leader and a táltos, but this táltos did not mean the same táltos as in the Madüjawr of later times. These táltoses were simply hegins in the speech of the modern day Madüjawrians. In the eyes of an ancient village, they were still capable of miracles. There were villages where these healers talked to animals, there were places where they healed better than anywhere else and there were places where they summoned ghosts. Etele was born in a wandering village with such a ghost summoning táltos.
He was already different from other children at birth. The táltos at that time predicted a bright future for him. He believed that little Etele absorbed the soul of his mother, who died during childbirth, but that way the little child would live with two souls. This conclusion was only supported by the fact that when the baby opened his eyes, they were unnaturally pink, as if cherry blossoms were looking out of the child's eyes. The táltos, who predicted a bright future for him, was little Etele's father.
However, the man died barely three years later, when he turned twenty. Thus, little Etele, who was already known since birth because of his physical apperance and his strange-colored eyes, was a real born táltos, this barely three-year-old child became the orphan of the village. Most of the inhabitants of the village were afraid of the child, only Aunty Susa, who was still a young widow at the time, and the then thirteen-year-old táltos, Töme, who took care of him.
"Etele, are you paying attention to me at all?" The táltos addressed the little child, who just looked out of his head.
"Yes!" The boy snapped at him, but he didn't listen to a single word. He lost interest when the táltos began to explain to him the importance and steps of praying to the father of water for the third time this week.
Etele has been a quick learner for as long as he can remember. If something interested him, he learned it in seconds, but if something didn't, then no one could beat it into him with a sword. However, since the boy had already learned what this unlucky táltos was trying to explain to him the first time, he had no intention of dealing with the matter now.
Rather, he spent his time trying to recall the images he had seen in his dream. He always dreamed of strange things. About an invisible world where everything shone in amazing colors, where a strange vibrating mist sat on everything. This world moved the little boy's imagination much more than the one he had to live in every day.
"I swear, if you become our táltos, our village will be over!" Töme ran his hand over his face.
"I don't want to be a táltos!" Little Etele folded his arms in front of him again. However, as is usually the case, fate always catches up with people and if ther is something they really don't want, it happens to them. Young Etele had barely turned twelve when Töme died.
As was the order and manner, the new táltos Etele buried the man in the company of a group of adults, in the bed of one of the rivers. Among their people, burial under the river was a tradition. As Töme always said, river water helps the soul find its way to the Shadow World and cleanse it of sins so that it can later return to life.
And so, as Töme's soul was washed away by the river, that's how Etele officially became the village's new táltos. In the first few days, no one could speak to him, the boy was grumpy and didn't want to come out of his yurt. Then the days passed and Etele realized a surprisingly good thing. Now that he was the boss, he could do what he wanted and when he wanted and no one in the world could stop him.
His mood changed from one day to the next, he was constantly smiling and going crazy. And the wandering village started to call him Svihák táltos, i.e. 'The Worthless táltos'. However, the boy was not interested in this. He has made up his mind, he will not make the mistakes that his predecessors made.
Because in his tribe, as if there was some kind of curse, the táltoses always died quickly. The reason for this, as Etele gathered from the elders when he was still a little boy, was that the village was always protected at night by a ghost guard, which was summoned by the táltos. That's why Etele decided that he wouldn't summon any ghosts. It didn't matter how badly the villagers looked at him because of it. He didn't want to die young, he just didn't.
"They say he is the punishment of the gods, a living daimon."
"I've heard that he's not even human and that he kills everyone who gets in his way, even children."
These were the first signs of the coming storm. Whispered words by tiny campfires about a savage enemy, a warlord who brought the entire region under his power. Although he heard these whispers, Etele still let the ominous words pass his ear. After all, what did he have to fear? Not that this great warlord had time to deal with his little nomadic village...
"Soldiers! Soldiers from the East!" The cry shook the whole village. Everyone rushed out of their yurts and gathered in one place, led by the village chief and the táltos, who was considered the oldest in the history of the village at the time, the twenty-five-year-old Etele.
The eastern horizon was in flames, the soldiers were approaching the village with torches and weapons. They were still far away, but the villagers could clearly see that they were heading in their direction. It was as if demons had emerged from the depths of the earth, or straight from the Fene itself, the land of gases and poisons.
"We're going to die!" Several people started to panic, mothers held their children close to them, fathers picked up axes and hammers. However, before madness could take over the village, a harsh voice rang out.
"No one will die." The announcement came, and the villagers were more surprised to see their serious-looking táltos than to see the impending danger. Etele started towards the edge of the village with clenched fists. "No one leaves the outer yurt circle. Leave this to me." He said, but he didn't look back at the crowd behind him. For the second time in his life, fate led Etele to the path he most wanted to avoid. The saying is true, there is that power from which one cannot escape.