Death and Honor – part 1
Welcome ladies and gents. Here is the first part of a short story I wrote a while ago. I was never one to throw my work in peoples faces but as i’ve moved farther down the writer’s road I’ve learned to get it all out there, and thanks to Darren, I now have a spot that works wonderfully for this. This story involves one of the characters from my current novel series I am writing. It was written as a short story excerpt from her life so I could get to know her character better. Hope you guys enjoy it. And, as always, feel free to comment.
“Tell us another story Grandmother!” squealed one of the many little children gathered in a pile at the old woman’s feet. “Yes another, another!” cried other child shouting over each other.
“But it’s getting late my dears,” replied the elderly woman to a sea of upturned faces.
“But Grandmother, tell us just one more tale. One of the old days when you were young.” A slightly older girl asked as she came to sit on the edge of the firelight, among the younger children gathered there.
“Ah my dear Arrianne. Very well, just this one more.” She paused as she spoke, a gentle smile touching her lips as she gazed at the brunette girl who had just seen her twelfth summer. “I will tell you of a time before we women of Tor’Maltea were warriors.” She looked at the young girl Arrianne and said, “And of your namesake my dear, the lady Arria de’Melin.” The children cheered and rustled about, settling themselves for the story. Some lay down in the grass at the Grandmother’s feet; others leaned on each other and many of the youngest girls fought to sit in Arrianne’s lap.
“Hear now the story of a woman that changed the future of our country and thereby the world…”
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It was another cold night where the wind tore at the cloaks and seeped between the joints of armor. The guards that stood watch on the towers of the great fortress city of Gradith Azul, the capital of the wilderness kingdom of Tor’Maltea, fought to stay warm. The small coal burners placed along the parapets gave the men’s armor a reddish glow as they stood huddled around them watching the darkness around the city. This night, like so many before, found men taking careful watch of the surrounding countryside and speaking in the hushed tones of the wary.
Here in Tor’Maltea were the greatest mounted archers and light cavalry in all of Ulista. Here also were the finest and only breeders of war wyvern, a serpentine winged menace to all who opposed an army fielding a flight of them. Often the people of Tor’Maltea were thought to be borderline savages to the more refined countries of Carpathia with their monarchial rule and definitive caste system, or the thriving city state of Krall as it is ruled and guided by it’s parliament and military leaders. The opinions of Tor’Maltea’s bordering nations did nothing to prevent those same countries from paying top price for Maltean warriors, known across the continent of Ulista to be the most dangerous mercenaries known. Only the tales of the Savage Elves and the rumors of the atrocities they commit on the field of war rivaled the Maltean’s accomplishments of sheer ferocity on the battlefield.
Of course such excellent warriors did not come without a cost. The people of Tor’Maltea had been suckled on a mixture of blood, war, and suffering in a dangerous land filled with wild men and savage monsters. For this reason they became a hearty people of great determination, stamina, ferocity, and deadly combative skill.
But these things were all as of yet to come. This story takes place long before the wyvern breeding ground in the south had been established and before the wild tribes of Tor’Maltea’s rocky grounds had been banished or all together destroyed. This story takes place as the people who would become such a renown nation of warriors had only begun to struggle to plant their roots amid the rocky shores and hilly meadowlands that characterized their soon to be nation.
The city of Gradith Azul stood as a beacon of the accomplishment and determination of these hardy people who had come from the far north by sea. They skirted the lands of eastern Carpathia, finding no welcome for their bearded men and fur-clad women among the aristocracy and social caste there. Nor could they find a place among the universities and philosophical circles of the enlightened leaders of the great city state of Krall. So they settled in this hardened land, which shared so many similarities to these foreign northern tribesmen.
Now here stood a great city in defiance of all the adversity that plagued these people, driven from their homelands by disease and the encroaching of the Northern Wastes, a foreboding place where nothing survived. Death ruled from where she sat on a lonely throne deep in the far reaches of the Wastes, spreading her poison slowly through the lands. In spite of such adversity, here the Maltean people stood, united and strong, defiant to all that may come.
As the Fates fickle hands would have it, things did come. This new land, filled with possibility, also happened to be resident to many wild tribes of barbarians and relentless hordes of feral beastmen and monsters. Once, the ruler of the Tor’Maltean people, Chieftan Keagan al’Kon tried a road of diplomacy and peace with these inhabitants, in hopes of a peaceful life in this new land. But the hordes that resided here were not ones to believe in peace. They only recognized the strength of a fist and the sharpened finality of steel.
No, this was no land of peace, no land of rest. But this land would be a place of new beginnings and growth for his people, the chief had decided, and Gradith Azul served as a beginning for this new life. His people would stand defiant and strong against the waves of barbarians and beasts and they would emerge stronger and victorious. It had always been the way of his people and would continue to be.
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