Okay. So, in the olden timey days almost everyone lived quite a ways north of where we live now, and by that, I mean north of Ansdron, which is one of the most northern cities these days. There were supposedly a bunch of islands where everyone lived happy lives, enjoying the sunny beaches. That is, until the Kathaldi, who lived on just one of these islands, started stirring up some stuff.

The stuff they stirred up had to do with the Gods. The reason I am capitalizing ‘Gods’ is because this wasn’t a case of “are the Gods real?” They were definitely real. They weren’t interfering, or ‘helping’ as they called it, all of the time, but they showed themselves now and then. The Kathaldi weren’t idiots. They didn’t say the Gods weren’t real, they said we should ignore them. That, as if the Gods were our parents, we needed to move out on our own and ignore them, so we could grow up.

As you can imagine, the Gods didn’t care for that. At first, though, the Kathaldi only lived on one island and there were almost one hundred islands and all of the rest of them were full of normal people who worshipped the Gods the way they were supposed to. So, the Gods were like, “No problem, our true believers will prevail against those dufuses (or is that duffuses? I’m not a scholar. Either way, hopefully you know what I am talking about.) We’ll be fine.”

Of course, the Gods were wrong. (I am not trying to be sacrilegious here, I am just continuing the ‘Gods are like parents’ analogy because my parents were wrong all the time. Especially my dad who left because none of us would ever amount to anything. I mean, I became one of the greatest heroes ever, so obviously my dad was, and maybe still is, an idiot. It all depends on if he is still alive. I don’t care either way because he is a jerk and I am well adjusted. Screw him! See?)

Anyway, the big problem is that unlike most of the other islands who were just trying to get along and didn’t care what every other island was doing or thinking, the Kathaldi wanted everyone to agree with them and even do what they said. It was like they were the wives and the rest of the islands were all husbands.

So, the Kathaldi started attacking the other islands. But they were pretty smart, they only attacked one island at a time. They also prepared, sometimes for years, before they attacked an island. During that time, they would send ‘agents’ to their target island and try to pave the way for an invasion with bribery, or lies, or whatever would help them take the island over. At the same time, they developed an entire class of people on the island of Kathaldi who were dedicated to the conquest of the other islands – the Warrior Monks of Kathaldi. Ironically, taking over the other islands was almost a religion to the Warrior Monks of Kathaldi. It’s ironic because they were basically fighting the idea of religion. See? They argued that no one could ever be considered an adult if everything they did was dictated by the Gods. “We have to be able to make our own decisions!” they would shout. Man, I hate those guys. The Kathaldi also had a lot of badass mages. Total jerks, according to history, but good at killing with magic.

So, long story short, they were pretty good at taking over the other islands, one by one. The other islands kept acting like, “Oh, I bet that is the last island they’ll take over. No need to band together and crush those creeps.” So, island after island kept coming under the control of the Kathaldi, but slowly, over decades. They were patient people, these awful, awful Kathaldi.

After awhile even the Gods started to notice. At the time they didn’t interfere much with the daily lives of their followers, but they still got their strength from the number of worshippers they had. Since the Kathaldi were killing all of the priests on every island that they conquered, as well as any followers who wouldn’t agree to abandon the Gods, they started to notice their strength weakening.

Finally, the Gods decided to do something about it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

They rained down snow and hail and ice and rocks and all sorts of awful stuff and buried those islands under a mile of all those things that I just mentioned. The island people who could fled south to Mindolo, the continent we are on now. At the time it only had the other races like Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and scary monster types living on it. The mountains to the north of our fair city, Ansdron, marks the beginning of the barrier separating us from what used to be a bunch of islands. Since we are attached to that barrier this became the Mindolan peninsula, but it is also a continent. Weird, huh?

This was around four hundred years ago, and nobody had seen or heard of any Kathaldi in all of that time. I’m pretty sure that everybody figured they were all dead. And it is pretty easy to tell a Kathaldi by looking at them. They are all white. Super pale white. I’m as grey as they come, like Mindolan men and women tend to be. The brown-skinned people mainly live in the western kingdom of Orcin. The different colors of men aren’t always friendly with each other. All of the Mindolans and Orcin don’t exactly love each other, you know what I mean? And we all hate the Kathaldi. What with them almost getting us all wiped out by the Gods.

Now that you know all this you can see why I was pretty confused to hear that the centuries dead Kathaldi were after Thilos, but I decided to play it cool because that’s how I am. “Hmm, it seems like we have a lot to catch up on,” I said with a knowledgeable smile while raising one eyebrow like smart, worldly folk do.

Thilos laughed, nodding, “That we do, Dirk, but a drink might help me get it all out.”

I looked at him and decided I could use something to drink, too. “I guess I’ve got some Ral Malan Gold wine that I’ve been trying to get rid of. I might as well pour it down your throat as into the sewer.” I led him into the sitting room and motioned for him to sit in one of the chairs while I got the wine and some glasses.

“Ral Malan Gold Wine.” He shook his head wistfully. “You must be better than I thought.”

I smiled. “Let’s just say that over the years I’ve put my talents to good use.”

To interrupt for a second there are a few things you should know about this conversation. One, I was, and still am, better than Thilos thought I was. It is very helpful to be underestimated. And two, Ral Malan Gold wine is the most expensive wine you can get, so I was being pretty hilarious, and cool, to say I would just pour it down the sewer if we didn’t drink it. I know people say if you have to explain a joke then it wasn’t that good of a joke, but I think it might be different if you are explaining it to idiots. Like, maybe there’s an exemption for that. The Idiot Exemption. I like that. I feel like I will be using it a lot while telling this story. No offense.

So, we did some drinking and a lot of talking. Mostly Thilos did the talking since he was trying to get me up to speed with what had happened over the last week or so, but we both did a lot of drinking. By the time he was finished we were off of the excellent Ral Malan Gold wine and on to my normal drink, super crappy and cheap wine - but it was still wine and once you have had a few glasses what’s the difference? It’s just being good with money at that point.

I apologize for the fact that I am going to have to fill you in on what happened to Thilos before he came to my place but I wasn’t there, so it is pretty hard for me to describe what happened as if I were. Plus, I tried writing some stuff in the third person and it was awful. Here’s a sample of what I wrote where I imagined the leaders of the Kathaldi recently meeting to plot against the rest of the world:

The evil Kathaldi main leader guy walked into the evil meeting room early to soak up all the evil vibes from all the evil that had happened there over the last four hundred years. “Man, we have done some awesome evil, haven’t we? Those were great times.” He smiled evilly as he perused his evil memories, stroking his little chin beard thing slowly. “I can’t wait for all the other evil Kathaldi leaders to get here so we can plan some more evil against all those other non-super pale people that we all hate so much!”

As you can imagine I don’t want to talk about this a lot but suffice it to say that it sucked, and I stopped pretty quickly and decided to only describe what I lived through. So, all of this next chapter is all stuff Thilos said so it could be accurate, it could be colored by his beliefs or memory or by not wanting to embarrass himself, or he could just have totally lied to me. But that last thing is not like Thilos at all. He can be wrong, very wrong, but he is not a liar. When he tries to lie it is so obvious. It’s almost funny. Such a goody-goody. But no one is perfect – even me.