Beyond Tillersgate

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. And, in the North, their presence was still absent. The North had no legends of dragons, no tale was told of them. No farmer had ever looked up at the night sky and seen one cross the moon. Grandmother’s never warned the young of them or told harrowing tales of loved ones sacrificed to keep a dragon at bay. No, dragons simply just did not exist in the North. It was doubtful they ever would.

What lurked in the darkness of the forests and the cold of the mountains here, were clans of men. They were destructive and tyrannical. In a word, brutal. The tales told in the North, the ones that struck fear into the hearts of the young and old alike, were of these men. All the bloodshed, and atrocities, both ruthless and cruel, were due to men, not beast, and certainly not dragon. They were quick to anger, solving all confrontations with the sharp edge of a blade. No negotiations, no sympathy, barbarous and harsh, echoing their surroundings. They were unchecked in their power and cruelty and took what they wanted with no mercy or remorse. Maybe the North needed dragons, if but to tame the men. But, there were no dragons.

~

Tillersgate was a small village on the edge of the Tiller forest, where the great Mountains of Averiss cracked open into a deep canyon. The canyon was narrow and craggy and the only way one could cross into the fertile valley of Irisian in the southwest. It was a one carriage road at best, the locals knew to go by foot or horse, and leave the carriage at home. But by foot or by horse was dangerous, and seldom few who had actually succeeded in the crossing, ever came back to tell the tale, and so, the village of Tillersgate saw very few outlanders from the south. Tillersgate people saw little else of the world besides what was just beyond their village square.

They were hardy folk who often felt trapped between a rock and the North. Tiller Forest and the Mountains of Averiss were just over the border from the South, a land that was very unlike that of the North. Northerners had heard tales of the South, of its affability and abundance. It sounded a dream world, where things grew easy without toil, and death and suffering were surely rare and odd things. This was at once welcoming and terrifying, for they had grown comfortable in their fear and their ways, why risk never arriving at such a wondrous place as the south must assuredly be. So, they stayed in their village, in their comfortable uncomforts.

Tillersgate was on the outskirts of the North, but, it was still North and it had been witness to the brutality and devastation of loss in all its forms. Tillersgate people did their best to stay quiet, invisible; out of sight, out of mind was their motto. They let the world turn and they kept their heads down in the hope they’d be forgotten by the rest of the world. But, they rarely did. They were after all, between a rock and the North and they refused to budge.

The last time death had visited Tillersgate, Ethan had just had his 15th birthday. He had been on top of the world; a new puppy and a jar full of worms to go fishing with, his heart was full. Ethan wasn’t a simpleton, he just found joy in simple things, like most of the people in Tillersgate. In their ravaged world, they had found solace in small joys and simple pleasures, for what more could they expect from life. Certainly living to see the next harvest was a gift, not to mention 10 of them.

On his 15th birthday, Ethan had shined so bright, his joy radiated from him, it was catching. His smile lighting the smiles of all who saw him. And the village was light and joyous that day, all because of Ethan, and they would later say, that is why they suffered the next. For that magnitude of joy was dangerous, it could upturn the order of things, and power must be held with a bloody fist in the North, or so it had always been.

The day after Ethan’s 15th birthday, the Clan of Seven ripped through the village. Herds were slaughtered, crops burned, winter stores stolen, fathers and sons chopped down and mothers and daughters taken. Ethan and his new puppy survived by hiding in a hollow of a tree, how he managed to get himself and a puppy up the tree and into the hollow he couldn’t tell you, but he did, and they stayed there until the silence from the village could be felt in the soul. Others too had found places to hide and the clans always left some alive. What fun would a raid be if you had wiped all places from the map?

So, Tillersgate was left just enough alive to survive and rise again. This was the cycle of things in the North, the villages were like weeds, and would be cut down when they started to flourish, or stretch too high towards the sun. The sooner you learned that and accepted it as a fact of life, well, the less painful the reality would be.

Ethan survived that day, and so did his parents and siblings. His uncle and cousins, however, did not. Neither did the Town Father, or his family. His daughters were taken and gone forever as far as Tillersgate people knew. The Town Mother, who had magic in her blood and would have been a high prize for the Clan of Seven, had escaped capture or detection by making herself small as a mouse. That is what she told the village anyways, no one had ever seen her perform such magic.

Her name was Breena. She was a wily young lady with wild honey hair. She wasn’t tall, but you’d never know it until you stood next to her. She was much too young to be a Town Mother, at only 16, it was unheard of. But, she had wisdom deep within her, and knowing eyes that saw too much; knew too much. She seemed innocent and sweet, but her stare said otherwise. She had magic, and magic had been slowly bled out of the North for eons, so a witch in one's village was a rare gift that had to be kept secret. All the villagers of Tillersgate had been spellbound by Breena. They would never be able to speak her name to an outlander, the further one got from the village the more her existence seemed to fade from memory until finally, she ceased to exist at all.

Except for Ethan, no matter how far he had traveled from Tillersgate over the last 12 years, through the canyon of Mount Averiss and into the valley of Irisian and beyond, he still remembered Breena. He never forgot her.