Bryndis

Fair warning - I am writing this for my own satisfaction, without a rough draft. It may not be interesting to anyone but me. It's as much an essay on the state of Salmaryn's climate as it is a character back story.

Knoton, more like nuthin', am I rite? Ha ha, you're a regular laff riot, you know that? I've never heard that one before. Tell you what, you buy me a drink, and I'll forget you tried to tell that tired joke in the first place.

...

Nah, I'm not mad. Knoton really is is a nothing little town. The respectable folk like to say we used to grow more hemp than any other district in Salmaryn, (and older children like to scare the little'uns by telling them we used to grow gallows.) Thing is, we've had about a thousand years of irrelevance for everyone to forget what the name really meant, and the only thing we grow now is dust.

The winds used to blow in from the coast, warm and moist, so you'd get plenty of good, steady rain. Now, you either get biting gales blowing down from the mountains with a killing frost, or hot dry wind that lasts for days and just sucks the moisture right out of you - and the crops. We have to irrigate by hand - open water evaporates too quickly, and we can't afford the pipes for a project on that scale. With the ground so dry, the winds scour the soil straight off and blow it away. No matter what other sights I may see out here, despair will always be the look on my father's face as we watched an ill-timed dust storm pick up our entire crop of new-planted wheat and blow it into oblivion along with the soil it was planted in.

When it finally does come, the rain comes all at once. We used to get a whole year's worth of rain in a few days. Gale force winds at ground level, but no wind at cloud level to push the storm away, 'y see, so once they start, they stay put until they blow themselves out. Rain blows sideways hard enough to shred the leaves of anything you actually managed to grow. Except it isn't rain, it's mud, 'cause the water pulls all the dust out of the air. Mud that sticks to the clothes and the people and the food...everywhere but the fields where it's needed so badly. The mud's still liquid enough for flash floods, though, and what little soil we had would roar off into the gullies and ditches. We didn't just have to irrigate. Knoton has to dig it's own soil out out of the gutters and shovel it back onto the fields, and it seemed like you could never find as much as you lost.

Of course, all this is when the wind blows at all. You wouldn't believe how  stale  the air can get on the continent of the corrupted wind crystal. Smells linger long enough to turn sour. You've smelled rotting things, right? Well, in Salmaryn the smell itself goes rotten, even after the source is long gone. It's like the whole region has been turned into a Dutch oven. Air gets thin, too, like there's not enough of it, or else it's heavy and useless, like it's all been used up by other people breathing, and there isn't anything left for you. Crystals forbid your town get a sickness. With no clean air, just breathing and rebreathing the funk, illness can turn into a plague far too easy. You take it for granted that air moves. You have no idea how oppressive it is when air doesn't, when it feels like air will never move again.

You'd think the winds would be a relief, but they're not. Thin air, or used-up air, or poison air, or scouring air, or dust-choked air, but never fresh air in Knoton. Maybe not in all Salmaryn, at least not without expensive magics. If you've always lived there, you've never known what it is to breathe free. If you've once left, you'll never be able to settle down to stay again. That's why, now that I do know, I don't just want to send my parents money. I need to get them out.

Hmmm? Oh, well, windbreaks are key, of course. You plant crops with good ground cover, and you plant in narrow stripes and patches, so the harvested crops don't leave the fields bare all at once. Plus, every once in a while all that dust will land on your fields for a change. Still, it's strictly subsistence level stuff. Some towns are lucky enough to have natural wind breaks, and the ones on a trade route, with something worth selling might be able to hire a mage, or buy the right crystals to eke out something more. A backwater like Knoton, though? *shrug*

...

How'd I get out? Well, I got this uncle who's a trader. His son, Kristos, used to stay with my folks n' me when Uncle Sal was headed on a long trip, or through dangerous territory. We were about the same age, so Kristos 'n me 'n this kid called Jax used to run together. Uncle Sal 'd stop by between trips with goods we needed, or a bit of money to help us get by, and Jax n' Kristos n' me would listen to his stories. Twice, we even got to ride with him in a caravan as far as Where's, you say? You've really never heard of it? Well. If you've never been, words can't do it justice. Just make sure you sign on with a caravan headed that way before you die, and make sure you arrive with money in your pocket.

I think...I think my uncle wanted us to leave someday, ya know? I mean, would you want family stuck in a dead end backwater like that? He could never convince my parents to leave - hell if I could see why - but I think he wanted better for us. And, they'd never admit as much, but I think my parents half wanted it, too. There's something going on between them and my uncle that I could never quite see, but I think they wanted us to have a chance at something more, if we could find it.

So, anyway, one day Uncle Sal rolls into town, and he's got these crystals. Only, they're not elemental crystals, they're  monster  crystals. Turns out that with the right enchantment, you can store a monster's spirit inside a rock. Once it's there, the bearer can then summon the monster forth, and it'll be friendly and willing to help out.

Trick is, the monster's gotta be willing to move in, and it's gotta be dead. There's this narrow window where the spirit has shuffled off this mortal coil, but before it rejoins the mystic mojo of the cosmos, where the spirit can decide that mystic mojo stuff can wait. If you impressed it enough - say, but being strong enough to take it down - the monster might just decide it's willing to stick around. You'd think they'd be inclined to revenge, seeing as you just killed 'em, but occasionally one will sign up. Maybe it's a being-of-pure-and-unfettered-light kinda deal. Or maybe monsters are just pragmatists about the whole "I tried to eat you, you tried to kill me" dynamic.

Anyway, once you've enlisted one, they'll work for whoever has their crystal. Maybe they won't be so enthusiastic as they would have been for you, but you don't have to tell the buyer that. And buyers aren't too hard to find. Just think what you could do with the right monster for a wingman. And that's setting aside questions of fashion, and status, and bragging rights among the upper crust. Match the right monster with the right buyer, and you can practically name your price.

So Uncle Sal comes home, and hands us, Jax n' Kristos n' me, each an empty monster crystal. Tells us what they can do. And tells us that if we can convince a critter to move in, he'll help us find a buyer. Oh, it wasn't as generous as all that. Sure, the raw crystals are worth something, but they're worth a lot more when they're inhabited. Remember what I said about how you get a monster to move it? It's rather a risky business. So the three of us are at that reckless age where we're sure we can do anything, we're itching for a big break, and here comes Uncle Sal with our ticket the world outside. It's win-win. We get our chance, and he gets a cut, and honestly, we'd have done something stupid and reckless soon anyway. This just stood a good chance of being profitable

...

So my cousin and my friend and I are out there monster hunting, and our knowledge ranks somewhere between Jack and shit, and we're equipped with crap we found out back in the tool shed, plus a few hand-me-downs from Sal's last batch of hired guards - stuff so battered, they didn't want to take it with them. We're 15 and 16, arrogant and cocky and convinced the world is ours. So of course we almost get wiped our first trip out. And the second, and the third, and...well, you can see where this is going. When we're healthy there's no point turning back, it's a risky job but it'll make us rich when we finally score. When we're hurting, it's too late for caution, it's them or us.

And because we're young and stupid, we don't learn. Well, they don't learn. It got so I was real good at taking attacks the others didn't see coming. So good at it, they didn't have to learn. They could take the reckless chances, and know I'd be there to haul their bacon out of the fire, again. Oh, don't get me wrong, I love 'em to pieces, but there's only so many times you can take a claw to the gut for a guy before you start to wonder what it's all for.

We were at it a long time. Took us three years to fill our three crystals. Time enough for me to notice something. See, we were out there because we were going to change things. Make it big, live in luxury, sure, but we all had families at home, families who broke their backs and wore their fingers to the bone just trying to eke out a living. We wanted to change all that. See our families in comfort, hell, why not put the town on the map? Be the sort of big damn heroes that everyone looks up to. Except I got to noticing that, for all our foolish antics, the guard who stayed where he could protect the town from approaching monsters was doing more to actually make life better than we were. All our brag and bluster began to feel...hollow.

OK, you go ahead and laugh, old timer. Sure, I'm 19, and I've got the gall to be talking about those foolish young'uns like I'm not one of them. But if we get jumped on the road tomorrow, and you have to fight bandits or monsters, I'm the one who'll make sure our employers live long enough to pay you for it. So credit where it's due, old man, those three years mean something.

Anyway, Jax and Kristos couldn't see it. So when we finally got our monsters, and caught a caravan to, instead of sinking my stake into more crystals, I cashed out. Bought some better equipment, and hired on as a caravan guard. The boys thought I was crazy. They still think monster hunting is the way to make it big, and maybe it is. At least they're trying to make a change, and that's a start. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something more, some point to all this, something else I'm meant to do. And I won't stop looking until I find it. ...

I need a whole vocabulary list here, of the "Eskimos have 50 words for snow" variety. Or maybe I don't, and I just need space to play with the fruits of a Wikipedia trawl.

simoom  - Dry, dusty, and hot enough to burn.

sirocco  - Hot, dry, and sweeping all your soil over the water to fertilize somebody else's fields.

khamsin - Hot, dry winds that settle in for a season.

sukhovey  - Hot, dry winds that kill your crops by dehydration.

oroshi or piteraq - for the cold wind from the mountains.

bora - coastal, changeable, dangerous for boats