The Rings of Salammis

History Lesson - Part 2

     "The teleportation arch was invented back at the very dawn of recorded history," began Saturn. He rose from his chair and began pacing back and forth behind it as if lecturing to a class of apprentices. "Back then, the human race was confined not just to the island continent of Garon but to the south eastern corner of that land mass, sharing it with many races of degenerate creatures whose rapacious onslaughts had for centuries threatened the very survival of civilised man. The wizards were mankind's single trump card in those early days of strife and conflict. The one advantage they had against enemies stronger, faster and, in some cases, more cunning and resourceful. Without the magic users, the human race would almost certainly have been driven to extinction, and if man had been remembered at all by the surviving races, it would have been as merely one more mythical creature alongside the Gurks, the Kelns, the chameleon skinned Hoth and the bat winged Baklars who had roosted among the towering ice crowned peaks of the mighty Habbalurgs."

     "Perhaps a little less of the colourful detail," said the Director with a slight smile. "You're not entertaining children around a camp fire."

     "Yes, of course," said Saturn with a scowl of annoyance. "The important thing, the thing that I was just getting to, is that the wizards of that day had known they were needed. Everyone else had known it as well, and so the wizards had enjoyed a high status among the peoples of the primal land. In most of the city states of that far off time, wizards had ruled as kings, ruling with an iron fist, cruel and terrible. In others, they were a ruling class of aristocrats who treated the mundane population as a slave race, to be worked and oppressed until they dropped in their tracks from exhaustion and despair. Wizards had been hated and feared, therefore, and if it hadn't been for the danger threatening humanity's very existence they would long since have been hunted down and exterminated.

     "The wizard’s were needed, though, and so they were tolerated, and it would be many more centuries, as humanity slowly grew stronger and spread across the island continent, before the balance of power began to shift and we were forced to reassess our position.

     "It was into this primal world that the wizard Khesh Tarr was born. The only son of the wizard King of B’hann, Whispering Thell the Cruel. Whispering Thell had had a wide ranging reputation for malice and brutality, but the crimes and atrocities that his son was to commit eclipsed him completely, to the extent that the mundane slave population came to remember the reign of the father as a golden age and prayed to the Gods for him to return and re-take the Cloud Throne from his murderous son. As it turned out, though, the unhappy citizens of B’hann were stuck with their hated overlord for three centuries as he went on to become one of the first raks, but it wasn't for this that he is best remembered nowadays. He is remembered today as the creator of the teleportation arch, which could be smuggled into neighbouring cities hidden in merchant caravans and used to move invading armies inside the walls to rape, pillage and conquer.

     "Teleportation arches always come in pairs. Two arches that are, in fact, one arch that exists in two places at the same time. The first ones were made of polished obsidian and carved on every surface with words in the language of magic. They were great heavy things, weighing up to a ton each, and stood on pedestals of granite mined from the roots of the mighty Habbalurgs..."

     "Saturn," said the Director. "Campfiring again. Please try to contain the flowery language."

     There were smiles around the table. Everyone knew that Saturn loved to tell stories. He loved to be the source of information, to be the one that people came to with questions. In his mind, they would sit at the foot of his throne while he dispensed his wisdom, acknowledging his superiority over them in knowledge and understanding. It was said, although never within his hearing, that if he eventually ascended to godhood in the afterlife, he would be the god of egotism.