Before I know it, our breakfast is finished and our shower shenanigans come to a body-wracking end. Melody spends a moment watching me dress in my green tunic with a fur collar and tight brown capri pants.
“Don’t forget to keep me updated. I want to hear all about gossip and deals.”
“Are you sure you’re not a merchant disguised as an adventurer?”
“Hey, I can like you for you, and your ability to make us richer.” She smirks into a kiss.
I pat her face, smiling back, “Sure honey,” and kiss her again.
Minutes later, she pats my butt and shoves me out of the door to a waiting carriage and two women coming up the path. What exquisite timing, Melody.
“Miss Zhantsa! Such a pleasure to meet you and be your guard for our travels. I am Larida Hawk.” A cobalt blue troll with five centimeter long tusks bows before stepping off the path to make way for me. She is tressed in a thick leather vest and a heavy leather skirt with pleats to ease movement, and a pair of metal plated forearm guards which I assume are used as shields.
Most notably, she is barefoot. I smile at that, relieved that it’s not just me who feels no need for shoes.
“It’s a pleasure to see another Troll, miss Hawk.” I nod my head in greeting.
“Ah, the midwife was telling me that you remember nothing. I was not sure I believed it until now. We go by first names or titles. Too many Hawks or Leopards or Foxes to call everyone by their last name like humans do. The only exception is on first meeting if someone doesn’t introduce themselves. Then it’s just clan name with no mister or miss.”
She helps me into the carriage after her brief lesson as two other men fix my trunk to the back.
“First things out of the way, how well do you know Maude, and do you trust her?” Larida asks.
I briefly want to be defensive, but the woman seems calm about the question. “She saved my life, so I trust her, but I wouldn’t say I know much about her. Though if you don’t want the Duke to know something, you probably shouldn't say it. No offense Maude.”
“If it’s a threat to him, then that’s definitely true. Otherwise, I tend to keep the secrets of my friends quite close.” She smirks at me. After finding out through Melody that she and Leeda were rebels, I understand that expression.
“Alright. So, the discovery of a Sky Troll in the Southern Marches of Human territory was a political quagmire. The High Shaman wanted to march the entire warband down here to get you, which would have looked like we planned to take over Rivayne at the very least. She was convinced to send an Envoy instead, to negotiate and try to provide for you until we could meet you. Khalis, Zaphra, and I have been living in Rivayne since, trying to keep the peace and trying to get permission to come down here.
“It took the High Shaman telling Duke Rivayne in no uncertain terms, that if a meeting was not arranged within six months, she would bring a security contingent to Marcrest and force the meeting.”
“How many people is that?” I ask.
“A hundred give or take. Old Trolls the lot of them. Say what you want about Human fear of feral Trolls, but that danger doesn’t even approach the terrible might of an enraged Ancient.”
Maude’s breath catches.
“I take it you’ve heard of the Ancients?” I ask.
She nods. “They’re legends, heard of only in stories. But they are rumored to be calamities unto themselves.”
Larida nods. “Less than a week later, we’re pulled into a meeting to discuss how to make this visit happen and I meet Maude who was to play messenger. Now, here we are, staving off war!”
“Why would the High Shaman be so interested in one wayward Troll? Not only that, you have sent quite a lot of money my way over the last year and a half. What expectations will my patron have of me?”
“We take care of our own, Zhantsa. When I was asked to live in a foreign land until we made contact with or recovered you, I didn’t hesitate—none of us did. You are rumored to be a magic user, and those are rare among us, so the desire was even stronger to recover you once we heard. If it is true, you will be expected to join a clan.
“There has been some discussion on what your land holdings mean to both Skyreach and the Human empire, but that is a discussion for people that can set policy.”
“My magic is only in imbuing aether into things. I can’t cast spells or anything.”
“Share your status sheet with me?”
I should check my messages first.
/experience and knowledge convey rank Novice 2
I note the changes and send my sheet her way.
“Well, I know what we’ll be doing during our overnight stops. Weapon and combat training. Never have a seen more lopsided skills on a Troll.” She chuckles about something as she looks at the sheet. “Do I even want to know how you got poison resistance so high?”
“I got to advanced by eating two kinds of mushrooms that were not good for me. Though Glow Caps are very tasty. I have several in my trunk if you want to try them.”
Larida looks wide-eyed at me and then at Maude, who shrugs.
“Yeah, I know I’m weird.”
She shakes some thoughts out of her head, Goddess only knows what, before asking me about my class. “What exactly does that entail?”
“Well, I like to make things. I made this crossbow.” I summon a bolt repeater. “And with the imbuement skill I can infuse things with aether and intent. I mostly just make glass right now and charge aether batteries. Imbuement works quite nicely with herbalism and alchemy I hear, but I need more practice.”
“A hybrid class then. Can’t say Zaphra is going to love that, but you have magic, and that’s the most important thing.”
“How so? And is this some sort of ‘requirement’?”
“By the Sky you are anxious.” The Troll takes a breath before explaining. “Trolls with access to magic have the potential to become Shaman—the basis of our tribal system. It would be a boon for us, as you would be eligible to start your own tribe when the time comes, without it the land thing gets more difficult as us as individuals don’t usually own land. But, as I said before, that’s going to be in Zaphra’s hands, not mine.”
I grump for a solid hour before Larida insisted on starting my first lesson on how we organize ourselves into clans and tribes and how our subrace of Trolls live in general. We’re by and large settlement dwellers and almost exclusively in the mountains and foothills in the northern parts of the continent. She explains that all tribes are headed by a Shaman, and that many are from different clans.
The tribal council is a meeting of Shaman, over which the High Shaman presides, where she is the Spiritual, Cultural, and Military leader of Sky Trolls as a whole. Skyreach, the largest gathering of Trolls outside of the Earthen Empire, is a merging of tribes forming a crescent-shaped city with seven different tribal districts around the north western side of The Spear, the tallest mountain on the continent and likely the remains of a very large volcano.
She also explains that every hundred years, the spiritual and cultural leaders of the four subspecies meet and rotate at which cultural center they meet at. This tradition dates back some ten thousand years, to the time that the subspecies were tribes that wanted to strike out on their own but not lose touch with their heritage.
“How old was the settlement that they split from?” I ask.
“Ah, a difficult question to answer. Very few know more than rumor, but some say that the basis for the Capitol of the Earthen Empire was built four to ten thousand years before that. There are only two Trolls that I’ve heard of that remember the split: The Earthen Emperor, and the Keeper of Volcanoes.”
“Wow, that’s a hard time-frame to fathom.”
“It’s even weirder to think that we are the reason Humans know about their history beyond the last ten thousand years. Their greed and lust for power caused us to consolidate, and our history tells us that they are the reason we learned to rage.”
I obviously asked about that and she took it back to what she claimed was the ‘First Age’ of Man. Some million years ago, tool-using apes were found to be highly intelligent and excellent hunting partners with their determination, their persistence hunting, and their penchant for gathering in groups for safety. As time wore on, it became commonplace that a small tribe of Trolls would gather around a hundred humans into hunting villages in a symbiotic relationship where the Trolls could focus on magic to benefit all and the humans could focus on hunting and gathering to feed the Village.
Due to the vast disparity of breeding rates between the races, Trolls were a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, and Humans began wondering why they needed to support Trolls and suffer their laws.
When the conveniences of magic stopped working because they drove the Trolls out, Humanity’s limited understanding of the ‘technology’ of their villages led them to believe that the Trolls stole from the village. A simpler explanation was that they were too ignorant or unable to re-create the technology, but no leadership group ever admits to their own ignorance or stupidity.
Trolls grouped back up into towns of thousands, but against millions of hungry, hunt-trained humans, there was no escape for the beings that had focused on peacetime magics. It took a hundred years of human aggression and Troll retreat and consolidation before the first troll fractured their magic.
One Troll killed thousands, dying in defense of a new town, but not after teaching others to fracture their magic and reap the benefits of the personal power while not letting the anger and power consume them.
Another four hundred years of give or take saw the first generation of Trolls that were born not with magic, but with it already fractured and embodied by the Rage. After a thousand years from the first Human aggression toward their symbiotes, not a single Troll was born without Rage and magic became scarce—but survival was the game now, and Rage gave us a way through.
Troll scholars estimate that less than twenty thousand humans survived our retaliation, hunted as they were for nearly a millennia. They also say our habit of patrolling the forests and savanna murdering apes of all kinds persisted well into the next millennia, such was our anger toward those that betrayed our kindness.
It was the first Earthen King that postulated that humanities volatility was borne from their inherently short lifespan and that some level of understanding should be given when they inevitably returned. May naysaid his prophetic stance on the suspected extinct species, but the King knew that such an aggressive and resilient species would not disappear forever.
Five thousand years after the last seen human, they emerged from the wetlands and the tundra with magic and a bid for peace.
“We don’t know how they found magic, or how they developed it. But full-fledged Mages greeted our Shamen in parlay. The Earthen King struck a tenuous peace that lasted several thousand years. Then the experiments were discovered.”
She detailed the discovery of the perverse magic experimentation of race combining, and the torture they visited upon trolls and humans alike. Elves, Orcs, Naga, Grifani, and Manticore were the most populous of their discoveries, though the manticore were hunted to extinction because of their mad lust for blood.
“The second age of Man fell when Trolls, Elves, and Orcs struck an accord to kill every magic-using human alive. We stopped after reports of human magic use ended for a hundred years. The Elves and Orcs, well, it was a racial vendetta against torture and slavery.
“Though Humans re-emerged some twelve thousand years ago, their primitive nature indicated that the Elves and Orcs were successful in eradicating evolved humans from the face of Alaris. They developed magic again about the time of the Tribal Migration and we’ve been at a tenuous peace with Humanity since.”
“Fifty thousand years of recorded history? That is insane!” I mutter, my brain trying to struggle with the age of trolls, versus the age of humanity on Earth.
“Oh, I think that’s just the written history and the only species to drive us toward extinction. The planet and the stars have apparently tried to kill us half a dozen times, but every time some Ancient Troll pulls themselves out of the mud, ash, water, what have you, and passes on the story. Our anthropologists think that Proto-Trolls evolved with the precursor for tusked rhinos and unicorns during the last age of lizards some two hundred and seventy million years ago.
As my brain struggled to handle that knowledge, an alert tells me that my practice with Orion Black is an hour away, so instead of blacking out from being overwhelmed, I log over to ATC London with my vision fading to black anyway.