I’m not sure how long I remained outside the cave crying, my emotions bouncing all over. I was happy that I avoided death, upset because I had essentially tortured my new siblings, proud of my survival, disgusted at my changed circumstances and a host of other emotions all wrapped up together.

My crying jag was ended abruptly with the impact of a stone to my forehead. When I looked around to find out what had hit me I found a male troll squatting next to a small fire pit watching me. My unfortunate angle -low to the ground- and his use of what was at best a loincloth gave me more than a clear view of what I was not interested in seeing.

Scrambling onto my hands and knees I stood up under the careful eye of what I assumed was the guard of the ritual cave.

Without taking his eyes off me he reached down, grabbed a stone the size of my fist between his index and middle finger and with an almost casual underhand toss lobbed the stone and hit me directly in the center of my chest. The throw was smooth and almost hypnotic in its ease but the impact was strong enough to leave me bent over wheezing.

Rubbing my chest, the bruise already fading, I stood straight and watched for the next attack. The only response from the guard was a negligent sniff and a few pokes to the fire pit, though he made sure to always keep me in his eyesight. The way he watched me was the same way I would watch a wild animal. Prepared but not threatening.

Our mutual tension was broken when one of my siblings started to scream from within the cave. A few seconds later my brother came running out of the ritual chamber yelling as if all the fiends of hell were chasing him. After running passed me without even glancing in my direction the guard swept the firepit stick out and knocked my brother onto his back. During my brothers flailing I noticed that two of his fingers were missing, the stubs already scabbed over. My guess was that he had reached for our sister's food and she had taken offense to that.

While my brother seemed to be wild and straightforward, my sister appeared to be the more dangerous of the two. She showed signs of thought after I had disabled her.

Our guard and that seemed to be all he could be, showed only a hint of surprise when my brother ran out. It wasn’t until my sister started to whine inside the cave that his stoic expression changed. Lips wide, teeth shining, jaw half open, he began a full body belly laugh as if he had heard a great joke. It would have looked funny except for the mouth full of serrated teeth that would have made a shark envious.

Still laughing our guard continued to sweep my brother's feet out from under him each time he tried to move away. I just kept watch, it was obvious the guard was just trying to keep us from running away. While he was slamming my brother around with little care for the fact he was in truth an infant, he also wasn’t breaking any bones or even putting much more than bruises on him. Eventually, my brother gave up and began a truly massive temper tantrum, his no longer little fists slamming into the dirt repeatedly.

While I stood and watched this battle of the rugrat versus Goliath I missed the moment my sister left the cave. The moment the guard looked down to watch my brother throw his fit is the moment my sister made a run for the path up to the cave. Unfortunately for her, this meant trying to run past the guard, something the guard did not allow.

With a quick tussle, my sibling's necks were both held in two giant mitt-like hands, each just below the head, and directed to face toward the pathway down. Looking at me with a squint and a grunt of three or four words he gestured down the trail, using both my sibling's heads as direction batons, arms and legs flailing as he jerked their bodies forward showing me the direction to walk.

I wasn’t sure where we were going, but I wasn’t going to go running off into the forest. I knew very little about how to survive in a forest let alone in a new strange world. I also had the feeling that even with the rough welcome other trolls would probably be gentler on me than probably any other species.

The trail down the mountain was narrow and partially overgrown with thin sweet smelling scrub brush. The forest below was beautiful, a mix of thin green trees and patches of ash grey granite stones thrust up at random. Some of these boulders were small, not much more than head sized rocks, others were huge, towering over the trees around them.

The entire walk down the path I would glance back and watch as our guard ‘guided’ my siblings down the trail. They would occasionally slap and squirm against his grip, but he never slowed our faltered. Whenever I glanced back he would just continue gesturing forward using one of my siblings in a casual gesture. At a fork in the path, he sniffed and gestured toward the path which followed the mountainside instead of the path which trailed off into the forest. This new path started back up along the ridge of the mountain instead of down.

Eventually, we came to a collection of shanties that could laughably be called a village. Rocks collected into piles with loose bundles of sticks and logs laying on top of them to create ‘caves’ that even wild animals would find pathetic.

The most complex structure was a series of logs jammed into the ground in a kind of crude wall with more logs carefully arranged on top making a roof. Two rooms were formed in this way with more logs, these the size of full grown trees, laying in front of the ‘doorways’. Small and cramped, the pair of rooms more closely resembled that of a prison cell than it did a home. My comparison was appropriate since our guard threw, literally, my siblings into a room each then shoved logs into place to barricade them in. Staring at me directly he pointed at the ground in front of the cages/rooms and grunted out a word that I could only assume meant ‘sit’.

With a shrug, I did as I was instructed. I wasn’t a fan of the heavy-handed and rude treatment, but then again, I wasn’t forced marched down the mountainside either. If my good behavior kept me from experiencing that kind of ‘training’ to behave, I would take it.

I spent the next two hours sitting in front of the make-shift pen poking at my status trying to understand the system I was going to be living under. Waving my hand through an interface window that wasn’t actually in my field of vision was an abject failure. Thinking hard about selecting things was only slightly more effective. The grand accomplishment of my two hours of effort was moving the asterisks around on my stats. What did this do? Not a clue.

My brother spent those same two hours alternating between slamming himself into his cage and snarling with whining and grumbling on the floor. Occasionally he would make a noise of confusion but that was about the extent of his actions. Sister, on the other hand, spent her time chewing on one of the logs of the wall and staring out of a small break in the wall at me and anyone else nearby.

The villagers, if such a place could be called a village, were few and far between, but each of them stopped and stared in confusion at me and then the jail cells when they first noticed me. They most likely didn’t expect three prisoners to escape that naming ritual, that or they didn’t expect one of them to calmly wait. I wasn’t acting like a normal troll child or a normal child of any species I could name for that matter, but I had little choice if I wanted to make things easier on myself.

My status manipulation was eventually interrupted by the joyous sounds of my new mother stampeding up to our cages. Unlike her visage in the cave, this time mother was well fleshed out instead of deeply emaciated. Apparently, troll childbirth is very traumatic.

Scooping me up from my cross-legged seat, mother cooed in a guttural and high pitched tone as she hugged me to her bosom. Her other arm kept touching both jail cells and making loving tones. That our mother cared was beyond obvious even to my two siblings. The bits of overcooked meat fed to us, pulled from a bag strapped to her side, may have been part of the reason she overcame my siblings’ reticence.

After a while, I figured out that the repeatedly cooed words were actually our three names. My brother Dor-Dun and Sister Rah-so. What those names meant I wasn’t sure, but since my name meant ‘Son of Suffering’ I had no doubt those names had some meaning in this new language as well.

Soon enough our mother was gruffly driven off by our guard. He spent his time simply relaxing, casually watching me and occasionally checking on both of my siblings. Each time he did, my sister would crouch down and pretend to be sleeping, curling up in front of the place she had chewed in an act to hide her efforts, while my brother went into a paroxysm of snarling insanity each time trying to threaten and drive off our guard. Both met with little success, I could see the laughter dance in our guard’s eyes on the two times he made his checks. Each time he checked on me I simply watched him curiously and this seemed to confuse him more than my sibling's anger and escape attempts.

Eventually, even my patience had reached its breaking point. When I stood my guard's attention was focused squarely on me. When I started to wander over to a wood pile he stood and followed me closely. I could see he was preparing to pull me back so I, as casually as I could, pointed at a pile of firewood and waited for him to signal it was ok. With an even more confused air, he slowly gestured in a ‘go’ gesture.

After I found a bit of wood to play with I walked back to my previous seat and started to fiddle with my bit of wood and a stray sharp rock to see if I could do something to distract myself while waiting for…well…whatever we seemed to be waiting for.

Once I was seated again our guard returned to his spot near a fire pit, returning to his poking and prodding of the logs. Each interaction with me seemed to confuse him more. Good. Better confusion then anger and violence. While I was sure my new life would have both in spades, I was hoping that childhood would let me adjust to my new world.

Eventually, my fiddling with wood stopped being a matter of boredom and instead I was using this time to make myself a weapon, hopefully, something I wouldn’t need. Peeling the bark away from the body length stick I broke off bits of twigs and worked to sharpen one end. A simple spear seemed like a weapon that even a novice could use successfully. Pointy end goes to the enemy, seems simple enough. After walking over to my guard's fire pit I used the fire to sharpen the end of my stick. I don’t remember where I learned about fire-sharpening, but I knew it was marginally useful. I was careful to make no sudden moves when near my guard, he was clearly expecting me to attack him with my new weapon. Once I had sharpened my stick I held it up and examined it to be sure of its point when a new window popped up.

New Skill Learned!

[Carpentry - Weapon] (Novice 3) - The working of wood, even in the crudest of forms, is a needed skill for any weapon-smith.

Carpentry is the skill of turning raw wood into a finished or partial product useful for homes, furniture, weapons, and even decorative finishes. The sub-skill of carpentry weapon-smithing focuses on the shaping of wood for the comfort of the hand, the selection of treatments and wood for the correct hardness and flexibility for the intended use of weapons. Hidden synergies are available.

Examples: Staffs, Spears, Bows, Inlays, handles of all kinds, etc.

Novice 3? Each of my skills before when I had gained them had been at novice 1. It had taken time while using my skills before they had gone up in level. Why was this time different and what exactly is the difference between 1 and 3? What exactly did a higher skill do for me? Again, plenty of questions, few answers. I assumed 3 was better than 1, it seemed reasonable, but what exactly that meant wasn’t clear.

The part of my status I was most interested in was the ‘attunement’ and ‘mana’. Mana meant magic, and magic could be amazing. It might be as important to my future as a fire was too early humans. How to use that wasn’t clear though. Attunement seemed important as well, especially since it was listed as ‘unknown’. The only reason it was that interesting to me was that of the potential for it to be either very good or very bad. The unknown was always a wild card.

Watching the villagers I tried to understand what daily life was like here. Who did what, who was important, what trades existed, etc. My conclusions were depressing. No one was really doing anything, most were listless and seemingly bored. Staring at fire pits, playing with bits of shiny stone and slowly eating bits of burnt food. More than once I watched a pair of trolls head into a ‘hut’ and the sounds of what could only be sex drifted out. No one seemed to care, no one was really interested in what was going on.

The entire village seemed to be bored waiting for something. What everyone was waiting for became clear shortly before nightfall. A large hunting party trudged tiredly into the village hauling partially slaughtered animals and what could only be considered monsters. To my disgust, more than one of these creatures appeared humanoid. A small green creature I would call a goblin, a large dark-skinned creature with a wide face, slanted brow, and small tusks that I thought of as an Orc. The goblin was wearing only a dirty loin cloth but the orc had well-made leather armor with small metal studs and thick-soled boots. They had been sentient creatures and now they were being butchered for food.

I made a pledge to myself that I would only eat meat that I could identify and avoid eating sentient creatures unless I was starving. Somehow I thought that my objections would eventually be overridden by hunger and the thought made me queasy.