The Company of Loria - told by a Tryker Chronicler (Part One)
Part One
For many a year our people prospered in the ancient lands of Trykoth in the force of the peace that our alliance with the Fyros procured.
The original deal was we\'d supply Fyros cities in the north with water for their expansion, and they\'d provide us with protection against our Matis neighbors who\'d been blatantly casting their greedy eyes over our lands. Incidentally, this was about the time that the Matis had dammed the great Munshia river that takes its source in their territory and rolls on to the Fyros wastelands. So as it happened, not only would we be running a route through a sliver of their land but also nudging them out of the water business, hah... Still, I say it served them right for overtaxing their water in the first place. Just like the Matis to spite their own noses, no sense of commerce...
More than ten thousand free homins, Trykers and Fyros alike slogged away four and a half years solid carving a twenty foot wide aqueduct through 500 miles of flat bark along the Matis coastline. Thirty great mills along the way churned the water along feeding it in an endless flow from the Trykoth lakes to the Fyros desert dunes in the north. Settlements sprang up along the way many o\' which grew into protection outposts or trade towns, it was the beginning of a whole new way of life.
The North-South water route paved the way for new trade, anything from silverweed sap and moon linen to auberwood resin and prakker grease. Those were the glory days as old pa used to say, bless his soul? Oh, no doubt it weren\'t all glad-rags \'n\' lily-paddlin\' everyday, I grant you. There were some troubles, in the shape of the Matis mostly, as green as a sap-pickled toad, they were, and biting their fingers for being so greedy! But all in all folk lived a merry enough life; plenty of food \'n\' drink, dancing and dallying and not to mention bags of work all year round, what with upkeep, repairing and peddling...
Yep, everything was swell as a clam in a shell when the Fyros - never happy with their lot - as per usual went poking their noses where they shouldn\'t and inadvertently set off a huge fire stretching from Coriolis to Destranon.
Well, to cut a long story short, the new Matis king, Aniro III, took advantage of the Fyros being all caught up in fire and swept through the city of Karavia at midway on the water route killing everything that so much as raised an eyebrow! Everyone dead, gone, all in one night. Horrendous, it was, unthinkabubble? I get a lump just thinking about it?
T\'was indeed sad times that befell our fathers. Well, after ploughing his way through water route villages and outposts, razing everything in his path, the dark Duke, Gioni di Tylini sent an ultimatum at our mountain gates for us to lay down our arms or have our wives and children cut to the marrow. Well, true to our life-loving spirit and always quick to adapt to a tricky situation, the Tryker tribal chiefs thought it best to stay with the livin\' so as to fight another day!
That notwithstanding, though, many a Tryker took their chances in the hills that backed onto the great impassable wall of the Zoraï. But once the Matis closed in on them they were like sitting game for the picking and the Matis made examples out of most of them.
We were herded off like yelks in our thousands, driven to the Matis territories where we were divided up and dispatched over the lands. We were set to hard labor making arms and general skivvying for over fifty days and fifty nights till the answer to our prayers came, not from the sky but from underground : Loria and her company of intrepid Trykers were to change our way of thinking, and bring out our true colors in a way that we would never have dreamed?
