The Book of Terrus: The Wise and Powerful

Chapter 1 - Young and Old

OoOoO

The Teeth were a forbidding place. Few often traveled in those mountains, and even fewer still enjoyed the journey. There was something about those sharp, towering peaks that warned the casual wanderer not to try their luck. They stood as a jagged hedge all the way from the frozen waters of Paledir's Bay in the north to the Bay of Torbos in the south, dividing west Goran from east.

There were only two ways to pass from one side of the kingdom to the other. Either one could book passage on a ship and sail around the southern coastline for weeks. Or, they could risk the narrow, oft-blocked passage through The Teeth; The Old Mountain Road. Either of those two options were time consuming at the best, dangerous at the worst. So it came to be that the kingdom of Goran had grown into two halves, time slowly gnawing away at the nation which First King Amenthis had founded more than a memory and less than a legend ago. This was a truth nearly everyone in Goran knew. Everyone, that was, except for Mahir Amenthis, the king of Goran himself.

The people of Trosk had no time for nor interest in kings. Now legends, however, they always had plenty of time for.

Nestled high on the slopes of the eastern side of The Teeth, the village of Trosk was far removed from the rest of the world. Rarely visited by outsiders, Trosk clung to the steep mountainsides like a ram on a ravine. Its inhabitants had lived there for as long as there had been maps drawn up of the kingdom. Roots ran deep in Trosk; nearly as deep as the roots of The Teeth themselves. The old men often joked that it would take the mountains rising up and shaking Trosk off their backs like a dog shaking fleas for their folk to ever go anywhere else. They belonged to these mountains, as surely as the stars belonged in the night sky. The people of Trosk were a mountain folk, the only ones of their kind in all of Goran. No one else would dare to live within the mighty spine of the world.

As the sun began to dip down in the west behind The Teeth, three such mountain folk turned their gazes down toward home. The best roots and buds for grazing could always be found in the highest reaches of The Teeth, and so that was where these shepherds took their flock each and every day. Not just any sheep could live and breed at such altitudes though. These were argali sheep, large and hearty, with horns so enormous that they could spiral back on themselves two or even three times. Their meat was lean, and so the people of Trosk as a rule were generally lean. Argali wool however was known throughout Goran for its unique salt-and-pepper coloring, as well as its incredible warmth. This made shepherding a good livelihood, as well as an ancestral way of life for the mountain folk. For good reason though, no more than a dozen households in and around the village still kept argali flocks.

Even for the experienced mountaineers of Trosk, The Teeth were no place to be trifled with. Some six years back, Thrymm Thalgenson had fallen to his death while tending his family flock in the upper steppes. Adding to the loss was the sad fact that Thrymm's wife, Myra Khesadaughter, had died less than a year previous after a long battle against a winter fever. The villagers, when the daily gossip ran short, would sometimes turn their memories toward that sad family tragedy and shake their heads. After all, as they would say, it should have been Myra up in The Teeth with the sheep. She was the true mountain-born woman of Trosk. Her husband Thrymm had been an outsider from the city of Anset on the plains below. It was almost to have been expected that the poor fellow should meet such an end in the treacherous reaches of the mountains.