Ûsric was born of Eláric of Kora in the year 564 of the 1st Age, and he was raised in the traditions of his ancestors, devoted to the Seven and the One, though his special predilection was for Hæliána, the goddess of the ocean and of the growth of living things. And though never in his lifetime did he behold the wide expanses of water unfold before him, never was he granted to see with his mortal eye the ocean, he spent the majority of his life in the woodlands of the Valley of Eressa. His move into the wilderness began with a rift from his father, or was the cause of it, as Eláric loved more than the beauty of the natural world the artifacts of man’s creation, the products of his energy and his will. Ûsric, unlike his father, thought little of human creation and did not see how anything that man had made could compare with the beauty of a single tree or a single leaf, a sunrise or sunset, or the slightest caress of wind upon the cheek.
When his father insisted that he embark upon the trade expected of him, to become a lumberman and a woodworker after the likeness of his father and his two elder brothers, Ûsric refused. “I wish not to build houses for men, to provide them comfort and ease, and to direct their gazes upon themselves. I wish rather to lead men out into the woods that they may love again the things that grow, that every year die away and yet rise again, that have life beyond our comprehension and beauty beyond our knowing.”
“Nay, my son,” said Elaric. “No right have you to dismiss that which, in my paternal authority, I saith unto you. Be humble and obey, and you shall prosper.”
“Obey you I would, did it not go against the deeper voice that sounds within my heart.” And so the son, rejecting his father’s will, departed from the parental house and took refuge in the lands far to the south. Aggrieved was his mother, and his sister too, younger than he by a year, and dear to him as his own heart. But left he nonetheless and looked not back, so embittered was his heart with the hurt of his father’s demanding, and with his own stubbornness of mind and will. First he lived in a cave cut by some ancient hand or by the shifting of the earth or the unyielding blade of water at the edge of the uncharted forestlands that stretched unto the mountains. Two years he dwelt thus, fostering plants of all kinds to satisfy his hunger and drinking from a nearby stream to quench his thirst.
And in these two years he began to learn things that he did not expect, though his heart at first refused to acknowledge them. For he felt in this time the want of human company, and the hurt of loneliness, more than he had foreknown or thought. And because his solitude was chosen in bitterness, in flight, he could not find peace alone in Hæliána’s company, in her light. For his heart, closed to man, was closed also to the divine. And nature, too, so precious to him before his departure from his childhood home, seemed to turn on him at times also as an enemy, and he suffered bitter cold, and illness, and hunger. The world which spoke to him of his lady’s beauty, and never ceased to do so, also showed itself ambivalent, and he learned that nature itself, as much as it reflects the divine, is not itself divine, but a fragment of creative art, and something that, in times long past shrouded in the mystery of time and forgetfulness, was fractured and wounded as was wounded the very human heart.
Thus in the springtime as the second year of his sojourn came to a close, he returned to the village of his raising, to his family home, and though his penitence was sincere he did not intend long to remain. He said, somewhat begrudgingly (though in later years he would say it more freely), that his father had been, at least in part, in the right, and that he should not have departed with such division within his heart. And yet go he must, he said, and yet more authentically now, and his sister would go with him, her name Elýsia, and two other companions of his youth, his friends Íllen and Hûdris. They departed two months hence from his return, and they traveled far into the woods to whose edge alone Ûsric had previously gone. And their purpose was to create a new way of living unlike that offered by their prior home, something simple and beautiful like the first days of the world. And beauty indeed there was, and simplicity, although for years yet to come much that was born of childish enthusiasm and youthful idealism would fade away and sink again into the sober beauty—more beautiful precisely for its sobriety—of reality.
In these years a village was born, called by them Hinfast, meaning man-at-home-in-nature, and Elýsia was wed to Hûdris, and Íllen departed again to his home, following their venture no longer, though upon his leaving four more came to take his place, hearing of what the three had since accomplished. One of these, a woman named Áwen, became Ûsric’s wife, and thus the village began to grow as new members awakened to life under the boughs of the trees, enveloping, and the warmth of the hearth, enlivening and enlightening.
For fifty more years Hinfast grew, whether from the families living within its confines or from migrants coming from afar, until it numbered nearly one-hundred inhabitants. And Ûsric, now an old man white of head and beard, bent from age and toil, looking upon the village that had grown from the seed of his hope and planting, asked himself what he had accomplished. Was it good? Was it in accord with what he had, as a young man, seen and wished? If he had not been a more wise man than he was, he would have been disappointed, for the village seemed to him more akin to the life he had left behind in fleeing his father’s home than it did the idealism of his youth. And yet he saw that, among all that might be imperfect, something genuine was born, and much also that would have been excessive or harmful was mitigated and restored to right and wholeness. For in his eyes beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, Hinfast was beautiful, and it was good. The families who lived there had found a home, and happiness according to humankind’s lot in the confines of this mortal life.
And he also looked upon the products of his own labor, the work of his own hands—the cabin he had built to shelter his wife and children from the elements, or those he had made for others, or the wall to protect the village from wild animals and bandits, or the artistic sculptures of stone and wood that lined his mantelpiece and which he also sold to nearby settlements—he looked upon the artifacts of his making, and he saw himself reflected within them. And in himself he beheld the image of his own father. “So this is what you meant, Ta,” he said unto himself, and to his father now long deceased. “Man and nature together are imperfect, yet beautiful, and both must strive ever upward to the place where alone beauty is undimmed and the form of all things is perfect, since aligned with the Source. I hope that my working, in both nature and art, has manifested this in some small way, and revealed me a fitting son of such a loving father, who, for all your weakness, have truly revealed to me the face of the Father of us all.”