Tales of a Stranger, Part II (Book)

Tales of a Stranger, Part II
But since there were only acolytes there the nature of the prophecy was kept a secret by the priests. They called for the stranger, who seemed to have lost his memory, to be brought to the temple, where they talked to him and asked him all kinds of questions. But much to their dismay he could not give them the answers they sought, for his memory seemed to be blank like the surface of the desert after a sandstorm. However, the priests had the wisdom of the secret prophecy to guide them, and so they knew that they had to give the strangers five tasks to fulfil before they could reveal his destiny to him. And so they did, and the stranger swore he would fulfil all the tasks or die in the attempt. His first task was to travel into the desert and to find the eldest of the scarabs there, so that the priests would reveal their wisdom to him and fill his empty mind with recollections. The stranger descended deep into the burrows of the scarabs in order to face their judgement and to find answers that had been lost in the desert sand aeons ago. But the stranger never returned.