The acrid, greasy ash from the fires outside the walls reached the noses of all the people in the sheltered town. There was no counting the scores of people who were currently feeling the agony of the fires, but there was no desire to, either. Instead, the townspeople sheltered in place. The few who wished to be elsewhere were gathering their possessions and trying to flee as best they could out the south end of the town, where there were no signs of a fire, and certainly no signs of the enemy.
They came from the North. That’s really all the information anyone really had. They had come from the North and began their wholesale slaughter of everyone, except in those places where they enslaved the unfortunate few who escaped the blade or fire. It was a subtle campaign of terror and destruction and there was little any southern kingdom would do to help these border towns and vassalages as they were too busy preparing for battles they believed could be better fought in their own realms. As such, the despairing majority were migrating south, where they were met with further troubles, but none of them as harsh as the force from the North.
This town, however, believed a strong wall and hardened militiamen would save them from the terrors of this force. That, somehow, they would be spared by either dignity in diplomacy or honour of battle. The screams of the soldiers outside the walls and the scent of their burning flesh proved otherwise. Even when the first batterings of the heavy wooden gates began the people of the town were still stuck in awe of the loss, or panicking for knowing the end was nigh. All except for those who fled through the southern end of the city.
Most of those who fled would find themselves met with vanguards who spared them no mercy, and so they were cut down in mass just past the river bridge that separated their town from the southern farms of their realm. Those few smart enough to have left the roads for the natural fords of the river would be lucky enough to make it away from the wholesale slaughter, but would find themselves facing grinning conmen and unwelcoming populaces as they tried to navigate in their new refugee status.
But today they simply fled. Their future unknown, their survival was all that mattered.
One such family, by name of Manx, had decided rather early in the day, the night before even, to begin their escape. It was not by lack of faith, but rather through sheer paternal and maternal instinct which drove them to their decision. Having just had a child, they were compelled in their thoughts to do what is best for their newborn daughter and leave the town, flee far enough south that it would give her time to grow and become better than a bumbling, bouncy, baby idiot. It was lucky, then, that the patriarch of the Manx had family in one of the southern kingdoms, it was luckier still that there still survived the parents of the mother.
All that left was to flee towards them, and hope that nothing would happen along the way to interrupt their path. Naturally, their first attempt to flee, made in the dead of night, was met with this feared interruption; they saw the lights across the fields, torches, as the vanguard moved itself behind the town’s defenses. It was decided to not make their way across the night, where they would be easily spotted, but to travel in the day, where the daylight would serve both to help their path and keep the vanguards focused on those unfortunate enough to believe that they could simply cross the bridge.
It was a brutal choice for the Manx to remain in silence about the ambushing forces, but it was one they made with the coos of a newborn in their ear. It was a far more brutal choice to leave the groups at the tree line, and flee into the forest to a natural ford, knowing ever still that the friends and neighbors they travelled alongside would be met with bloody end. Though a few did take to their route, and a few still took to their own, the Manx would find themselves crossing the river uncomfortably wet but safely alive, and alone.
The going was tough for the patriarch, with the wife and child, and handcart all in tow, but he was the pillar by which they crossed the farmlands into the dark forests of the borders, down past bustling cities still ignorant of the forces to the North, only spreading rumours and hearsay, and into the southern kingdoms by which men, dwarf, and elf, lived together in turgid politics but stable peace. The Manx’s journey was not the only to have happened in such a way, but it was the only one which ended in a baron’s estate, with a child raised in a healthy environment.
The rest simply faded from history, destined only to carry the fear of the north into the sourthern kingdoms and carry with them the many rumours and few facts of what had, historically, been the largest genocidal conquest known to mortal-kind. And rumours there were; slaves were used as food stuff, towns and cities completely raised, the dwarves of the north closed their halls and turned their backs on allies, and elves faded into forests and given to the wilds. More still abound; that this was no army of humans, or no army of elves, none of dwarves, that it was new entirely, or that it was summoned by dark magics to fuel darker magics still. No one had a good grasp of what had happened, or how, even those who had fled from it, experienced it and escaped, or served as scouts for the kingdoms.
The facts were exceedingly few in number and often as questioned as the rumours. That the force had used blade and fire was indisputable. They certainly took slaves. Most everyone who raised hand, blade, bludgeon, or shield against them would be executed summarily and their remains displayed on gleaming banners turned red with blood. But no one could agree on just what they were. Some said they had scales. Some believed they were elves driven mad. Some believed that there was a land to the North no one had discovered yet, where man remained savage and elves preyed upon them, thus stirring this “great migration” of violent peoples.
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The theories abounded, and yet the southern kingdoms did understand one thing; too soon the battle would be upon their borders. Too soon would their distant farmlands burn and fortress succumb to the tides of fire. For that they needed armies, great, massive, and disciplined. This was always hard to muster in the face of political disagreements, but in unprecedented speed did the kingdoms agree to unify, and in mere months many readied men and women stood at the helm of the kingdoms’ defenses. Those who could not fight would build, and if they could not build would farm and make.
In the greatest fear the people of the southern kingdoms experienced a rather ironic renaissance of artisanship in smithing and construction, and a revolution in farming, with better, more efficient tools built to streamline the process. A major army required food, arms, and training, of which also experienced a reform of such, with the regimen of many units becoming daily, some hourly, and some down to the minute. They prepared for total war, and for it to be both the first and last stand the southern kingdoms would make.
Oddly, however, this war they prepared for would never come to pass. While they witnessed from new walls the fires of villages and towns alike, the forces would never quite come close enough to warrant a major fielding of the southern kingdoms’ army. Instead those northern forces seemed content to ravage and destroy the countryside in a constant, terrible onslaught. The southern kingdoms, while safe and enjoying their newfound rigours, lost any and all allies in the north until finally the dwarves reported that all contact with northern holds was lost.
And after the last embers of a village a few miles away from the wall died, the southern kingdoms entered into a tense silence, unwilling to explore the north to discover this mysterious army that had so efficiently destroyed everything. Even those with no ties to the southern kingdoms were not allowed to leave the north gates, not to mention those few southern kingdoms citizens brave enough to try. Months would pass without any contact from the north.
Months became years.
Years became a decade.
A decade became two.
Twenty years passed before the first man stood outside the northern gates and asked to be let in. He was mistrusted and ostracized, but paid no mind to the common rabble that had gathered to see the gates opened and who would step through. He strode through the northern holdings of the southern kingdoms with a terse escort and nary a moment of hesitation in his step. And when he came to the court of the nearest king, offered unto him an agreement for trade between his realm and theirs.
In the king’s folly he struck this messenger down. The fear of the north remained a prominent part of the southern kingdom’s cultures, and this king, this man, was not immune to the whispers and rumours of the north becoming a land of gluttonous evil. Where the blood-stained ground grew nothing but ghosts and mushrooms, or where the men and women took part in each other in devious, torrid ways. It was this king that began the plague which would devastate the southern kingdoms.
No one could fathom the motivations of the messenger, but it was agreed that the disease in his blood was purpose enough to risk being cut down and infecting others. It was agreed until there were very few left who actually knew the story and understood the origin. People jittering in the streets as their mind failed them were terrible storytellers. And while this ravaged the region, the Manx family, which had thrived, felt their first impact when the son, born ten years ago to the plague, began a descent into madness. Soon followed was the father. The mother and daughter remained unaffected, and dutifully carried out their responsibilities with the added burden of the father and son being unable to carry out their own.
Two years did this plague ravage the kingdoms, until finally all that were left were either immune, as was widely believed, or simply lucky enough to not have been infected. The human population of the southern kingdoms had suffered the largest loss, as more than half succumbed to the plague. The elves were next, but as their number went uncounted it was at their word that they had lost no more than an eighth of their own. And finally, the dwarves, which had sealed their halls within months of the outbreaks and spoken to no one since. It had been guessed that they remained mostly intact, with what few who fell to the plague living outside the great halls.
The most disturbing impact of the plague was the great silence which followed. As people tried to rebuild and recover, entire villages remained empty, and cities had no need to expand for the refugees to take residence within. While those cities slowly became noisy again, the countryside remained an eerily quiet, woefully unlit, realm of superstition and mystery. The quickest to take advantage of the lack of humans were the elves, as they slowly took over villages that had been abandoned or depopulated by the plagues. This certainly did not bother the humans, who saw the elven repopulation of these places as a good thing if only to keep the eeriness at bay, and welcomed the elves to continue life as normal in the place of the dead villagers.
All the while, the Manx family, now without a father and son, remained on their estate so generously given to them by the late patriarch’s also-late father. And on the Manx’s daughter’s twenty-third birthday, her mother announced that it was time to think of marriage.