The Western Whirlwind

[revenant]

Those Early Years

The giant of man was not always so, in fact Grigor was once a small lad, frail and endearing in the way that only an adventurous spirit trapped within a runt-frame might be. Those early years in the caravan were rich in song and dance and tradition and story, even if the Family was without many of the comforts that the intruders from the Baronies seemed to enjoy. The incursion had happened long ago, generations before Grigor was even an inkling of a possibility. It had been a generational war, or so he had been told, and his people had lost in the most spectacular of ways. They were the conquered and the subdued now in the Western Territories; held to the whims of the governors and representatives sent out to subdue the occasional revolt or suppress the inevitable rise of some occult faction.

Grigor could not remember a time when there wasn't a fear of Torment or when the dead did not rise to feed on the unsuspecting or even when the tales of witches and their servants didn't creep through the night to snatch naughty children from their sleep when they failed to go to bed on time. Even in light of such desperate times, he knew happiness and felt pride. The matriarch, a wizened old woman whom herself had seemingly created the clan, had told him the tales of generations past; of the pride of the Collatian Empire and how it had unlocked secrets that the interlopers could only dream of. She had filled his head with the tales of their brutal suppression and the strip-mining of their cultural reliquary when the Decusians had eventually won. She had told him of the betrayal in Kaduraas and how the Republic had marched in, fed and fueled by those in Teramer and that the great pyre had seen generations of knowledge put to the flame.

That is where she would always pause, a slight twinkle in her eye as though she held a secret. "Why would they burn such a wealth of knowledge? No, they only wanted us to think as much...for the knowledge our people had, why it was the key to understanding all of this." And so she had planted the seed of hope and conspiracy within the young boy's head. That the true secrets, the histories of the people and the Collatian Empire, had been spirited away to the First Province to a series of underground chambers managed by librarians seeking to unlock the knowledge of the Old Gods.

It's always funny how the tales of the youth kindle a fire of passion later in life...Grigor was no different.