First Bloom - Intro

The north is a land of ice, snow and black stone. A harsh land, spacious and yet filled with nothing but challenges. Despite what horrible images this description of the frozen wastes might bring forth the frozen north has one great redeeming quality, its capacity to teach. A land so empty of resources is full of lessons, teeming with the opportunity to grow for those that would inhabit it. Humans are no exception to this rule. Scarcity has bred in them hardiness and willingness to commune with one another.Where the land is hard the hearts of men grow soft and empathy and selflessness are born. It is here in this cold lands inhabited by warm souls that our story begins.

The marais tribe is a tribe of hunters and warriors. Giant men and women that had learned to survive in the cold lands of the north by relying on one another. The tribe lacked numbers but not in strength, for each of its tribesmen and women was known to match a triad of warriors from other tribes without much trouble. Their village nests at the bottom of a valley surrounded by large mountains that tend to break the larger storms and shed their ice as water to the lake on its east side. It is here that men were blessed with her.

She was born to be tender like the warmth of her mother’s heart and bare in her will the strength of her father’s arms. His father would speak of her as a blessed child, lucky to have her mother’s looks and his adeptness at the blade. The man was not lying, it would be easy to compare her to the first bloom of spring in this frozen land. The most beautiful flower that heralds the coming warmth by breaking the cold and colorless crust of the snow that dulls the ground only to bask in the sunshine and splash color on a lifeless land. We would be at fault to believe that it is her beauty alone that is praised by that description, for despite it being stunning it would be the lesser of her virtues.

Since childhood, her father trained her in the fine arts of the blade and soon discovered that no blade would ever be as sharp as her mind was. Not only did she learn quick but she was also nimble in adjusting to new circumstances and sometimes even developing tricks of her own. Still, despite her easy mastery of the blade, combat was not her real interest, she seemed much more interested in the arts of healing. Developing new poultices or potions for various maladies was her favorite past time. The village’s healer was always happy to have her around and send her scavenging for herbs or other resources she might need. The girl would disappear into the pine forest for hours and return always with the required item in her satchel or back.

As she grew, her fame as healer extended beyond the edges of her village and soon other tribes would send for her or bring their sickly to be treated by her. She was content with helping others, but her heart wished for more and she knew well that despite being capable of helping where she was, she needed to discover the world. After much deliberation it was agreed that she would stay for one more year in the village training an apprentice and writing all her knowledge down, so that she could leave for her journey without leaving the village without a proper healer. Thus the year went by uneventfully and on the first sunny day of spring she began her journey south.

Armed with the clothes on her back, her healing tools, some herbs and a short sword she headed south with a trading caravan. They were long days of travel in which a lot of work was required to ensure the carts were not damaged by the weather and the animals did not get frostbite during the night when the temperature fell. After almost a month of travelling the first signs that they were leaving the frozen wastes showed up in the form of a short grass breaking amongst the snow.

As they moved from village to village selling wares or trading whatever hunt they might have caught in the road she learned many new tricks of the trade from local healers and sometimes even performed procedures of her own whenever a town had a specially rare infirm. She found joy not only in the fact that she was once again helping people but she was also doing it while discovering so much more of a world so ripe for whoever wished to harvest its secrets.

They were long months on the road jumping from town to town, moving to the south and to the grand city of arminier. She had heard stories in the towns and from her fellow travelers that arminier was a sight to behold. A city of a hundred towers and thousands upon thousands of people moving daily to grant it its life and make it the center of the kingdom. All these tales did nothing but excite even further her curiosity and as the days remaining for their arrival grew short her excite grew ever so much more.

Finally days later, as the sun broke the horizon and bathed the valley they were entering with golden light, she saw it. A huge expanse of buildings fanning out from a castle nestled against a lake. Building upon building of stone seemed to be crammed in every inch of the valley. At the edges long expanses of land were used for farming and pasture. The great gates leading into the city were already alive with traffic visible even from this distance. The canals that criss crossed the city were already being traveled by barges that looked like leafs knifing about the waters.