My name is Leomund Tolzi. No Von, I’m not a noble and as such I have never been a man to write much. I was born to Leosenn Tolzi and his second wife Bridgette in the jarldom of Ragnasenn Stonesplitter, during his grey years. For the first twenty years of my life, my reading capacity was limited to the runes of the faith, which I now understand to be less than one third of the written language of the skalds. I have chosen to write this journal in the common tongue of the central kingdoms because the events pertain little to my homeland and, to my shame, I am more fluent in it.
Before I detail the miraculous event that compelled me to wet a crow’s feather black, I will write a bit of my childhood so that readers may understand the man that I was.
Ragnasenn’s jarldom sat just inside the wolf circle. On a sun man, the glade of ice and rock would be a bit north of the western copper mine. As we men of the skalds reckon by the dragon rock, it was the thirteenth moon, meaning on the thirteenth night of every lunar month, the wolf’s moon sat overhead. In the past, all thirty fiefs were home to my ancestors, but the thirteenth to the twenty-second, along with the old acropolis, have long since been home to the mongrel race known as trolls.
This incursion became my primary preoccupation, for the gods had given me a gift for fighting. As my voice had only just begun to crack and deepen, I joined my first hunting expedition to kill a pack of the horned beasts. Young as I was, they gave me a spear to carry more as a walking aid than to fight with. Unless a panicked beast charged and impaled itself upon the weapon, I was unlikely to draw blood with it. It takes great strength to break through the lichen encrusted hide of the creatures, but there were tasks for an eager boy.
They gave me one of the siege horses (belägringshäst) which bore no rider. The weapon was mighty, the creation of some genius to the east. Similar in composition to the weapons mounted upon ships in the south, bands of lacquered wood were strung together to a trigger, armed with a heavy bolt traditionally crafted from the limb bones of trolls. When loosed, the missile could rip through a troll’s body from even further than the fire-worshiping beasts could fling rocks. Unfortunately, winding it back typically took longer than it took for the survivors to charge, so after the artilleryman took their first shots, the horses were handed off to boys like me and we scampered away as the hunters cut down the survivors.
This was my first taste of war, not counting the fights among children. My first taste of death came months later. The hunting party came across a trail of discarded baggage, and soon the abandoned cart it came from. Trails in the snow led downhill and our leader surmised it might be another northman. I think he would have left the people to their demise had they gone uphill, assuming them to be foreigners. Like bears, trolls tend to struggle rushing down a slope when they cannot easily reach out with their hands to grasp the earth. A healthy adult may thus stand a good chance of escape, so long as they aren’t caught against a river. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened to a group of approximately twelve men, women, and children. We came upon the carnage of smashed bodies while the beasts were piling up wood for a pyre. When the hunters descended on them, some tried leaping into the icemelt to escape the blades, but the slick rock rebuked them and a second volley from the siege horses felled them. The fire meant for the trolls to celebrate was then used to immolate the victims.
The hunting of trolls is an important business beneath the wolf moon.
For two years after that day, I continued to train with sword and spear as my body grew. My younger brother Nikolai joined, learning far quicker than I had the methods of the huntsmen and the two of us gained an early reputation. Thoughts inevitably turned from fighting to women as we approached adulthood and conquest made us arrogant. We believed we could marry into any jarldom we wished, so long as both of us could win the heart of a daughter in the same clan for we did not wish to be separated. Troll hunters enjoy respect everywhere in the north, whereas similar lives earn distrust in the south. For example, the shepherd’s lot is quite pitiable in my estimation, enjoying no companionship but that of his dog.
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In 747 CC, there was an interpersonal war between jarl Tor and jarl Minsk. This is a peculiar matter of custom to my people and would be considered merely criminal in other kingdoms. Skaldheim is a vast country with many people, and we understand well that we depend on one another as a greater clan. It is why we can manage trade, diplomacy, and military matters on a footing with Vassermark, but we are not so united. Feuds run deep in our blood and fresh offenses must be answered. To settle this, we have the custom of interpersonal wars. They are battles meant to be fought only between the blood relatives of those engaged and not to involve the greater fighting force of the jarldom. Not all jarldoms are equal however, and it is common for the smaller of the two to hire mercenaries. Typically these are foreigners, but troll hunters far from their homes are thought to be unbound by the council’s restrictions.
As such, I entered into the service of jarl Tor, lord of the twenty-seventh moon. There were essentially two campaigns, because nothing decisive was achieved before the wolf moon dimmed and winter forced us into the longhouses for a time. There, I trained, I drank, and I bedded the jarl’s granddaughter. I might have settled down in the impoverished town, if she hadn’t taken ill and died that winter of pneumonia. The jarl became convinced she had gotten sick because she had gone out in the storms too often to visit me and I was fool enough to say that couldn’t be true as I warmed her each night.
When spring came, he tried to get me killed by putting me in his little vanguard and delaying reinforcements. I should say that while the jarldom was poor and poorly armed, the old man had been a lustful beast in his years and was able to call up an entire platoon from his own loins. Unfortunately for him, I proved the greater fighter. When he paid me from Minsk’s coffers, I understood that I wasn’t welcome back beneath the twenty-seventh moon.
Now a man grown and with the knowledge that the men of mead halls knew my name, I took my time moving through the countryside with my brother. We joined other bands of troll hunters but also we served as guards upon trading vessels. We visited Portacheval, Drachenreach, and even to Jarnmark thanks to a liberal ship captain. By the time I returned to my home, I had fought and killed a man of every kingdom in fair combat, and several in unfair combat.
There was no homecoming celebration for us, however. The thirteenth moon had been harrowed by trolls when a particularly fierce blizzard blew so much snow against the windward palisade that the creatures could leap straight over and have their revenge. Our family were among the casualties. Both of us burned for revenge and we had a good description of the tribal chief that had so wronged us, but two swordsmen would never be able to hunt an entire pack of trolls, and purportedly, these were no ordinary trolls.
Our only recourse was to turn to the council and ask for a war band. We wouldn’t have to wait for a Great Moot of the jarls, but we had to wait months in the capital of the first moon for representatives to be fetched from all the jarldoms. Nikolai and I were relentless during the wait. We called in favors and cut deals. Promises were made to traders for supplies on the expectation of feeding such a war band. It must have been two dozen times I was challenged to a duel to prove my mettle for those that doubted me and that was the time men began to call me a swordmaster.
True enough, I was excellent with a blade, but I had never studied under a swordmaster so I didn’t understand how I could deserve the title myself. I felt a fraud when I was brought before the rune speakers and introduced. The great wolf, Chain Breaker, listened to my prayer. His response was not to me. He asked, “Will this one do?”
The man he spoke to was a strange fellow from the south. He appeared to be in the loose garb of a desert traveler, but the loose fabric that looked to me like nothing but a trap for snow and ice covered a fur-lined jerkin that looked firm enough to stop a blade. I thought it might have been dragon leather, but I was soon distracted by the striking appearance of his eyes. They were like the rainbow chasms of certain hot springs I had once nearly boiled myself alive in.
He said, “If you can provide me a storm and your big bell, then yes I think this war band will do.” That was how I first met the wizard Amurabi.