The Azure Wizard – A Legend of the Fallen Baronies
The Azure
Wizard
A Legend of the Fallen Baronies
By
Nicholas R. Trandahl
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
The Azure Wizard – A Legend of the Fallen Baronies
Copyright 2012 by Nicholas Trandahl
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Published by Swyers Publishing
February 2012
This book is available in print.
ISBN (for paperback edition only): 978-0-9843113-7-8
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not bere-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This work is dedicated to a handful of important cherished people: To Britt (This tale would literally have been destroyed without you), to Christian (I may be breathing because of your compassion), to Pam and Bill (Thank you for this opportunity), and to Mom (You changed my life when you suggested that I read The Hobbit when I was a child). A thousand times, thank you all.
Prologue
The Forging of Baronies
The Three Baronies’ ancient past was one shrouded in myth. The barbaric uncivilized people of the vast land that was to be eventually known amongst its inhabitants as the Three Baronies began to have visions of the Ancestor Lands and it’s dark twin known as the Soul Wastes. The Ancestor Lands were a peaceful heavenly realm that souls of good folk traveled to in the afterlife. It was believed that if enough praise and worship was offered to the ancestors that had come to dwell there, that one’s place was assured at their side when one’s life came to an end. The Soul Wastes were a bleak dark wasteland where the souls of vile and foul folk were doomed to wander for eternity. Throughout this vast land ancestor-worship became a faith that encompassed all of the land. That single simple, yet profound event marked the beginning of the Ancient Age of this barbaric land, an era of several thousand years.
The folk came and went, forged legends, and watched them crumble into dust to be blown away in the torrent of years. At the end of the Ancient Age a thousand years ago a single monarch, a tyrannical practitioner of Wizardcraft named Illumis, garnered support and named himself Emperor. He held all of these lands from the wild peaks of the Vhar Mountains to the white shores of Wendlith under his jagged boot of oppression. His armies conquered and pillaged, and he reigned confidently in Greenwell City, seat of power and the most populated of settlements, a place where learning and architecture were much more advanced than other settlements across the rugged forested face of the land.
The demise of Illumis started with a woman named Lady Quinn. A simple warrior from the hilly western forests with charisma and determination, she sowed courage and the seeds of rebellion in the oppressed commoners. When the agents of the Emperor became wise to the starts of rebellion the grip of atrocity and pain tightened on the populace. Lady Quinn, though, managed to avoid getting caught and with her most loyal followers she took to living in the abundant forests in the heart of the land. Together they learned the ways of the woods and became cultured in the arts of survival, stealth, and combat.
Lady Quinn’s foresters harried the forces of Illumis, receiving minimal casualties themselves, but dealing blow after blow to the land’s oppressors. Eventually Lady Quinn could no longer hide in the shadows of the wood witnessing the brutality and barbarity being dealt upon the folk of the land that she loved and cared for so very much. Illumis’s villainy had to be crushed.
Lady Quinn rode by herself into Greenwell City and she was captured and imprisoned in the dungeons of Illumis’s keep. After numerous meaningless atrocities and tortures Lady Quinn was hung in the city’s market square in front of the beleaguered populace, and in the presence of the Wizard Emperor himself with a substantial portion of his personal guard. During this macabre public spectacle Lady Quinn’s foresters rode into Greenwell City bearing axes and green banners emblazoned with a golden eagle, the nickname by which they had come to know their leader. Their presence initiated an epic battle in the streets of Greenwell City between Illumis’s loyalists and the rebelling commoners who were led by the foresters. At the end of the Battle of Greenwell City Illumis lay dead along with many of his followers.
The foresters rode throughout the entirety of the land, from frigid wastes to lapping shores, slaying the rest of Illumis’s forces over the following weeks. And by the end of the Ancient Age the yoke of tyranny, villainy, and oppression was vanished from the populace of the land, replaced by the spirit of hope, heroism, and expansion. This brave passionate land was divided into three civilized baronies to contain its numerous inhabitants. Greenwell and Wendlith to the south had existed informally for centuries, but barons were now placed in the charge of them. And to the north of the Barony of Greenwell, a land of high evergreen-shrouded mountains and small mountain villages, the Barony of Vhar was officially established. These separate sovereignties became known as the Three Baronies.
The woodsmen and women that served heroically under Lady Quinn were publicly proclaimed an official order serving the Three Baronies, and they were named the Foresters of the Three Baronies. Tasked with patrolling the wild places of the land, hunting dangers to the people and ensuring travelers were well-protected when traversing the land, the Foresters became a heroic organization looked favorably upon by all of the Three Baronies’ inhabitants.
With the dawning of the First Age the Foresters of the Three Baronies continued to grow in prestige and popularity, garnering new members but losing many others to the dangers of the wilds. It took a different kind of person to join the Foresters for upon joining the order one would continually face dangers and hardships uncountable with naught but the gear in his satchel and the requisite hand axe at his hip. Foresters didn’t even receive a wage and the order in fact only survived by donations, abundant though they may have been. The benefit to joining the Foresters of the Three Baronies came with the camaraderie among its members, a feeling akin to that of siblings and sometimes even lovers. Upon joining the ranks, one also was given the chance to do something important with your life for the love of your land, and with the assured truth of imminent adventure. Once bestowed the uniform of a Forester of the Three Baronies your previous life was at an end and your new life was about to start. It presented the opportunity to be a hero, not just in deed but also in spirit.
Also with the dawning of the First Age numerous features of the land of the Three Baronies were lost in the annals of history. Creation became a mere myth, legends became tools for storytelling, and Wizardcraft became fable. Where Wizards once threw eldritch fire from their arms and flew from place to place like birds, all that was left were memories of what power they once had. And these memories eventually faded to naught but tatters and wisps that frayed from the edges of legend. In the Barony of Vhar books were scarce, but history was considered very important. Certain families, those that once contained Wizards, began to memorize tales and legends to be passed down through the generations. These families were considered to be very vital to the barony.
Centuries passed and passed and the Three Baronies grew peaceful and quiet, but there were some, prophets and seers, which hid themselves away in the wilds of the Three Ba
ronies. Before Wizardcraft was lost completely to the people of the Three Baronies they managed to divine a glimpse of the future. They saw a future a thousand years distant where Wizardcraft would return in the form of a single Wizard, a font from which all Wizardcraft would spill forth. This would spell certain doom on civilization and thousands would perish in the Wizardcraft-warped aftermath. These prophets penned these glimpses of the tumultuous future and waited for the day when the Wizard would be born so that they could go to the individual and end the Wizard’s life. This Wizard in the future must be slain before he bore more Wizards in his bloodline, bringing an eventual resurgence of Wizardcraft back into the land, and possibly risking another Wizard tyrant such as Illumis. Thus a peaceful existence for the Three Baronies could be obtained and Wizardcraft would truly be forever no more than a memory, a fading memory.
Now, a thousand years into the First Age, that Wizard has been born and the Prophets are on the move.
Chapter One
A Storyteller Hears a Story
In a hidden mountain vale the wind whispered through the boughs of the trees like the soft sigh of a maiden, rustling the emerald-hued leaves of the aspens in a slow swaying dance. Dappled sunlight broke through the healthy foliage and shone on the grass and yellow wildflowers that carpeted the forest floor at the base of the aspens. The chirps of songbirds and the steady beat of a woodpecker echoed through the forest, mingling with the haunting melodies of the wind, creating a sylvan symphony to one who would listen, a person with a still mind that could hear the story that the wild places spoke in tones thick with the accents of woods and mountains. Ethan Skalderholt was such a person. He lay upon his back staring up into the swaying canopy, his angle making the trunks of the nearest white-barked aspen trees seem like immense natural columns. Ethan was a man nearing his mid-twenties in age, but with deep amber-colored eyes that had always seemed far wiser than the man to which they belonged. For almost the entirety of his two dozen summers he had been raised to be a storyteller, one who fostered history and knowledge in others through the telling of tales of the heroic or nefarious deeds of those long gone. It was quite uncommon a profession in the outer villages of the Barony of Vhar, in the northern reaches of the land of the Three Baronies, but still honored with some prestige.
Within the Barony of Vhar books were an infrequent occurrence, and in their place stories and legends were passed down the generations among storytellers who were raised with the task of memorizing the contents of the tales. For the quiet, humble inhabitants of Vhar it was the only way to keep a record of their long history, one of wild adventure and powerful heroes amidst a rugged, vast landscape. The Barony of Vhar was a place of harsh snow-capped mountains and crisp, clean skies where the thick evergreen forests that encompassed the terrain of the countryside were broken by only copses of white-barked aspen trees. It was within one of these aspen copses where Ethan now found himself.
He sat up and ran his fingers through his shoulder-length, straight blond hair with a contented sigh. He had come too near to dozing off. Ethan’s fingers were not calloused or rough like many of the commoners in the Barony of Vhar, but rather they were smooth and white, the hands of a storyteller. Rather than the life of scraping a living from this mountainous territory through the raising of goats and sheep, or growing potatoes and grain, storytellers grew up with a life of listening attentively to the stories and tales of the previous generation and thus avoided much of the manual labor required to survive this far on the fringe of the Three Baronies.
It was late spring and Ethan was dressed accordingly in plain trousers of brown wool and a white wool long-sleeved shirt that hung loosely from his thin frame. Ethan wore no boots or shoes on his feet. He owned a pair of leather boots but he rarely ever wore them. He preferred to walk the familiar earth of his homeland barefooted, having grown accustomed to the pokes of fallen pine needles, pine cones, and rocks. Ethan was a slight man in height as well as weight as he stood just over five and a half feet tall among a people who averaged at least six feet tall. He was also a man owning a very slight build. He and his family had always thought it best that he be a storyteller for it was thought that the labor of outdoor work would break his spirit as well as his body.
Despite this Ethan did have a handsome face that somehow retained its boyish charm even after having grown into an adult. Yet the young women of his village evaded any romantic notions with Ethan in favor of the stronger larger men of their village that were more apt to provide for and protect their families. Even so Ethan was a friend to many women in the village, whom he advised in frivolous matters of love and drama from his extensive repertoire of tales that were forever locked within his thoughts. Still, the storyteller wished to find love with one of them, any of them.
He rose to his feet quickly brushing stray stalks of grass from the seat of his trousers and began the uphill walk back to his village. The village that Ethan dwelt within was called North Ridge. It was located on a flat ridge about midway up a high, withered mountain known as Whitethorn Mountain. It consisted of about twenty-five families, most of them herders and farmers, each with its own log home and small plot of earth for crops or livestock. North Ridge also boasted a blacksmith, but that was the sole business in the settlement. People survived by simply raising their crops and livestock for their families with the surplus rationed out among the entirety of the village. This created a very isolated and sheltered community, many of its people having never been to another village much less a town, and many had no wish to ever leave. But Ethan did desire to depart this self-contained boring community.
He desired to see the other villages of Vhar and maybe even Lumberwall, the sole town of the Barony of Vhar located far to the south in the southern reaches of the Vhar Mountains that composed the entirety of the territory, on the northern border of the Barony of Greenwell. He knew numerous tales of heroes and adventures of Greenwell, the Three Baronies’ largest and central barony, a place of forested lowlands abundant with cities, people, adventure, excitement, and the ruins of the Ancient Age. Ethan also knew a few stories and legends of the Barony of Wendlith, a smaller barony of grasslands, coasts, horses, and exotic people that lay to the south of the Barony of Greenwell. But of these wondrous places, Ethan had no hope of ever seeing. North Ridge was his home, and it had been for generations before him.
Ethan found himself on a worn, dirt trail that wound its way up the side of Whitethorn Mountain between the solemn trunks of the evergreens. With the shafts of sunlight filtering through the pine canopy and the still quiet reverence of this northern wood, it felt to Ethan like what he would imagine a colossal chapel of the Ancestors to be like. As he hiked higher up the trail the reverence began to deteriorate as he neared North Ridge. Stumps of felled pines stood like grave markers aside the trail, and they grew in number the closer the storyteller got to his village.
Abruptly the forest broke and he found himself on a flat ridge that was cut out of Whitethorn Mountain’s south flank. Crowded upon this ridge was the small village of North Ridge with its diminutive pastures or gardens and rows of log homes built of the timber harvested from the surrounding wood. Numerous villagers were outside toiling with their livestock or crops, or making repairs on their fences and homes. As Ethan walked into the village only a few paid him any heed with a polite nod or curt wave. Amongst the somewhat larger settlements of Vhar, especially the town of Lumberwall, storytellers were held in high regard, not only raking in a wealth of coins but also owning their own story halls and advising the Baron of Vhar. But in a village like North Ridge endurance and strength were far more impressive and honorable than being able to tell stories of ancient heroics and legends.
Ethan responded in kind, a nod there and bit of a smile there, and reached the home of his family, a two-storied standard, timber dwelling with a stone-shingled roof. The pine front door was wide open as it always was during the spring and summer, and wool curtains were drawn back from open windows letting the bright sunligh
t illuminate the interior of the abode. Stepping inside, he became enveloped in the aroma of pine needles, due to the homemade candles that Ethan’s grandmother herself made. The scent of fresh bread greeted him warmly as well.
Ethan’s grandmother, Ethyl, stood in the kitchen of the household slicing a fresh loaf of bread. With each cut warm steam drifted from the loaf into the face of the elderly woman, a face of wrinkles due to years of laughing framed by long, straight ivory-colored locks. Her brown eyes, a much darker hue than those of her grandson’s, darted up to settle on Ethan and her face broke into a warm smile which in turn infected Ethan with an equal one.
“Ethan, where have you been? A young girl was around a bit ago asking about you.”
Ethan didn’t respond immediately, instead walking around the table his grandmother worked on, he hugged her with a firm arm as the other lifted a hot slice of bread from the table. After kissing the silky hair on the top of her head he replied, “Just out in the south copse. Did she part with her name by chance, Granny?”
“Aye, Wendi or some sort,” the elderly woman responded as she hurriedly sliced the rest of the bread.
“It was probably concerning her doomed infatuation with that dolt Abram, a log cutter no less. Oh well.”
“I don’t know about that,” Ethyl returned, “but it is neigh time for you to feed the goats.”
Ethan kissed the top of her head again, and he turned back towards the door. “Always work, work, work with you, grandmother,” the storyteller jokingly moaned before engulfing the slice of bread as he crossed the threshold of the home. Ethyl had never used to ask Ethan to handle any chores around the home as it wasn’t customary for storytellers to do so. She had married Ethan’s grandfather, also a storyteller, and had birthed a son who also became a storyteller. The customs of the profession were deeply engrained in Ethyl’s thinking. Now she was nearing seventy summers, and Ethan’s grandfather had passed away ten years ago from sickness. She had to begin resorting to requiring her young grandson to pull his weight every so often, difficult though that may have been for the traditional elder. But Ethan didn’t mind at all.
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