In a quaint village nestled between rolling hills and winding rivers, there lived a man who spent his days perched upon a weathered wooden chair on the front porch of his modest cottage. His eyes, a mirror to the vast expanse of his thoughts, gazed blankly into the distance as if searching for something just beyond the edge of his consciousness.

The man's mind was a void, a vast emptiness that seemed to swallow up any stray thought or fleeting emotion that dared to cross its threshold. He sat there, unmoving, a solitary figure against the backdrop of the bustling village around him.

Neighbors passing by would stop and exchange fleeting greetings with the man, but he hardly registered their presence. His mind was elsewhere, lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts and memories.

Some said he was a dreamer, a man who had wandered too far into the recesses of his own mind and had lost his way back to reality. Others whispered that he was haunted by ghosts from his past, memories that clung to him like shadows in the fading light of day.

But the man paid them no mind. He remained on his chair, a silent sentinel guarding the threshold between the known and the unknown, his gaze fixed on a horizon only he could see. And there he sat, lost in the vast emptiness of his mind, a solitary figure in a world that seemed to have forgotten him.

Collin walked down the path, and slowed as always when he saw the old man. Since he was a child, the old man had sat there on his porch, staring off the cliff towards the sea. Collin passed him on the way to the village, and on the way home after the day's work was done. The old man never moved. Many thought it disturbing, but Collin somehow found it comforting. Sometimes he stopped and sat next to the old man when he needed to clear his mind. He had, as of yet, had no problems too great for such a strange companion. Anger, grief, or even a desire for solitude were all quenched out, simply by sitting next to the old man and staring out into the mysterious void with him for several minutes.

Sometimes, Collin tried to make the old man speak to him. He'd even gone so far as to pour water into the man's face to shock him into doing anything--even if it was a slap to his own face--but it was all to no avail. Collin pondered the riddle of the old man as he went by, today more than usual. The sea was grey and flat today, yet the old man's eyes still fixed upon it. Collin wondered if the old man was waiting--waiting for something to happen. Perhaps for good news, or perhaps waiting for something terrible, like the long feared Captain of Agillis. What was the old man waiting for? And when it happened, what would happen to him? And more worrisome--what would happen to the village?