Within the city taverns, bards and storytellers entertain drunks through story and song. This is one such tale, as recited on a cold winter evening in Larder’s End.
The Bard’s Tale
Come closer.
Friends.
Gather round.
You know there is a war in the north.
One of blood and bone.
There has always been war.
But you don’t know why.
The war is older than the maps.
It began when fractured kingdoms carved their names into soil and called the lines truth.
They claimed it was for protection.
It was the trees.
The ancient redwood forest.
The cathedral forest whose limbs vanished into low clouds, trunks wide enough to shelter homes within them.
Their silence carries a pull that settles into the bones.
The Khuldinai came for the redwood and the Visari resisted.
From that first moment, neither side ever fully stepped back.
Atrocity accumulated on both sides until the word atrocity lost its weight.
A village burned.
A family slaughtered.
A generation executed before leaving the womb.
Eventually the people could stand no more.
The Empire imposed peace, and the region rejoiced.