------------- The Chronicles of Taure – Lorren

His home of West Edandor was on the far northwest coast of Taure, with a barrier of tall mountains that kept the concerns and wars and politics of the rest of the world at bay. But he had left that security far behind. He was in the middle of the rest of the world now. He had passed east of Anglan and the midlands, rode through Lavenel and Northport a week ago, and was soon to enter Highaven itself. But the nearness of the Dragonsea did little to push back the cold. The cold around him, and the cold still in his heart, might be there even if the sun rose tomorrow in clear summer skies. He snickered to himself. What would his beloved Eillana think of him now?

Lorren Smythe had been a blacksmith’s son. He grew up learning to handle horses and mend horseshoes. He grew up with sweat and hard work and the smell of hot steel in his nose. But things changed. His life was not what his father had wanted. He learned young how to fight. And the first time he stood with a broadsword in his hand, facing a warty, ugly, stinking goblin, he knew that his life would not be his father’s life. He would be more. He would be,… something else.

It wasn’t long after that Captain Connor O’Hanlon took him in as a trainee in the town guard. By the age of seventeen, he’d earned the title of Sentinel, Guard of Wintercross. One of the few with the talents to sense things even before others began to suspect their existence; he became invaluable on the wall as the threat from the wilds began to grow. He had won his sergeant’s tabard on one winter’s night when giants came down from the Icefangs. He was Sergeant of the Guard, the favored of Lord Douglas, Master of Wintercross, when the ogres came the next summer. Every farm and cottage outside the town walls had been crushed by them. He and Eillana had moved to their new homestead with their newborn daughter just that spring. Fight as he might to repel the ogres on the town walls, he knew he had failed his family. His dedication to Lord Douglas shattered, he destroyed what was left of his home and his life and moved on. In the months and years since, he wandered aimlessly. Consumed by his grief and near death more times than he cared to remember, fate found him instead.

The roads across Taure could hardly be confused for mighty thoroughfares. They were not all the great stone roads of central Anglan, or the clear and patrolled paths of Edan. Most were little more than deer runs through the deep forests. Those forests held the homes of the Elves, the Angwaith, who claimed to have been on Taure long before man appeared. They also held many lawless gangs of thieves. Those bandits were the greatest threat to travelers in the world. The goblins and ogres and trolls had all but disappeared in most of the land. Only in a few remote places like Wintercross would they still be encountered. But Lorren knew that would soon be changing. The Giants had come done from the Icefangs, and the suffering of all the lands would soon follow.

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