The Rumor
You understand, a while later, that they desire to see you stay with them. Of course, you accept their offer with great joy and quickly integrate yourself in the small community. With time, you even start to lean their language.
At the beginning you try to keep hold of the time passing by. But after the first winter and spring, you slowly, without really realizing that you are doing it, give up on it. Plans for the future disappear as you focus more and more on the present and helping your new family survive by winning money for them or helping them.
What do they do for a living? Don’t you know? They perform as what they call a storytelling troop. The closest modern human world equivalent would be a circus, even if you haven’t heard of any that only tell stories to make a living. They travel from village to village, performing in front of people and telling them wonderful stories. They usually don’t come so far north and were starting to head back because of the language and cultural barrier when they met you. You realized that, at the time, they were even lower on food and expandable supplies because of the little success they had, yet they took you in without a second thought. They did quite a lot for you, more sometimes then what you realize.
But it isn’t as if you didn’t pay them back. You also help in their troop, especially in stories with a dragon. You breathe flames, a great help in shows, and the first priority when you discovered that was to be able to control it enough that you didn’t accidently set someone on fire when you did so. ‘The Dargon’s Treasure’ became a great classic for smaller ones and bigger
ones when you crashed through the scene to make an appearance, breathing fire over their heads and roaring to the top of your lungs.
Life on the road may sound like fun, but it has its dangers. There are bandits, people with ill intentions, and not all the masters of the land are charmed to see a whole group of troubadours going through their territory – and that included, once, a real, full-sized grown dragon, that was quite shocked when it laid its eyes on you. That is why the Murrs all train in archery, at least a little: in case they would get attacked. You, after discovering that you were a full fire-breather, left the fastidious practice
behind and only take it as a source of amusement when you feel motivated.
Until you hear of Blurred again.
You are… well, you are out drinking as a celebration in a nearby town, after the seventh full night in a row. The large tent under which you perform was filled to the brim with an enthusiastic public and the Murrs finally amassed enough money to buy a bigger, newer cloth to replace the old worn-out one. After the performance, you best pals came over to your sleeping place – unless you are on the go, you prefer to sleep outside even if the cold makes you numb – and, guessing that you weren’t feeling sleepy just yet, proposed to go out to town and have some fun. You would have normally declined, you don’t trust your firing aims when you are drunk and you hate being hungover, but you told yourself that you would only give yourself a pleasant buzz before stopping. You will be the one bringing your friends back home this time.
Somehow, you started a conversation with some of the people on a nearby table, something that you would have never done without a good glass of the local alcohol firmly settled in your blood. You are still a little shaky around the exact terms for things, but through estimations and synonyms, you are understandable and you get everything they tell you fairly easily.
And luckily you do.
From what they say, there is a magician, who’s named is blurred in your informer’s mind, coming from the north that has been banished shortly after they discovered that he is a human from the ‘Other World’ – that’s how they name your birth realm. One of his friends, an Elf that goes under the name of Arch, has been caught after they suspected him to have been doing some
funny business around the sealed portals. After a long sequence of ‘persuasion’ – that’s noble slang for torture – he not only confessed the true nature of his college, but also that he has brought an other human in this world, a human that is still on the run after having escaped from the magician’s hold.
Of course, you soon connect the dots and realize that the human is you.
At first, the king wanted to kill the magician, but he was too powerful and he fled to the nearby kingdom, were he was protected. Since this incident, some years back, he is banished and even if the people don’t outwardly want to kill him because of his power, they are warry and don’t let him establish himself anywhere, meaning that he has been on the road almost as long as
you. He tries to hang low of course, to let himself be forgotten, but he has turned into quite the local celebrity by now. The reason why he surfaced in the current conversation was that there is news that he is in the region.
This case had been a great scandal at the time. Even if the northern kingdoms had stayed pretty much under the Other World’s influence and the nobles of those lands prided themselves in speaking, English, they keep the sealed portals under close watch and it was believed that it was impossible to go thought them anymore at the time. After that, they had of course reinforced the lacking security around the gates, even if the populations were pressuring the crown that they wanted the gates destroyed once and for all, like in the southern lands.
A little questioning about why are humans so bad teaches you what is just so bad about them, something that you never brought up with your Murr friends.
They were once just another race of this world, occupying the extreme south territories a very long time ago. The problem was that they were very reactive to magic: the slightest touch could change their entire shape. Because of that, they were extremely strong and dangerous to deal with, even if the downside of this power was that they could summon magic and had to reply on their surroundings for that.
So the old kings made a secret alliance to get rid of them. Because they were so powerful, no one wanted to get in their way and everyone was more or less completely enslaved by them: this couldn’t go on. But they also didn’t want to commit genocide on an entire specie: so they created gates across the whole territory, gates that lead to another world where they couldn’t strive,
because it was a world without magic at all and, humans, in their very essence, weren’t magical enough to come back on their own.
They first used the gates to forge items from this Other World, items that were able to suck out the magic of their surroundings. The humans, left defenseless, were then captured and brought to the gates, all until the very last ones – minus the ones that died on the way of course.
Once the world was rid of their nuisance, all the southern gates were destroyed. Since the North hadn’t suffered as much form the humans then the South, they kept a few, because humans were an ingenious and fascinating species and they hoped that they could benefit from communicating with them in the future. But, leaking hostile humans would be a disaster: the knowledge
on how to make the magic-sucking items had been lost to the ages. Would that magician want, he could be able to destroy a good deal of things before someone powerful enough to end him would have the time to react – and there still is this rumored human hiding somewhere, waiting, unless he was dead already.
Deciding that you had heard enough, you pay for the drink of your careful informer, that thanks you graciously, and decide that it is time to head back. You grab your friends the drunk Murrs and head out with them.
The night’s air is cold and crisp. Winter in the South is pleasant. There are the occasional downpours and the wind might go a little nuts but it’s better than facing ten foot of snow depth with nothing then a thin wood layer to protect you from the howling ice storm. You walk a behind your group, a little embarrassed at their loud singing and their dancing.
“So that’s what you have been doing all their years?” Ask a voice in English. You stop in your tracks: there is only one person that would spontaneously talk to you like that.
Written by Clayem on 03 May 2016