755 CC Apr 2nd

A reading from the Book of Dusk.

For the Sun is my shepherd, providing for my needs. He shines on me as he does the green pastures and as I lay beside the calm waters his warmth restores my soul. He is my guide on paths of righteousness. Though I may walk through the caves of shadow and death I will fear no darkness for thy light shines always on me. Thy glow comforts and embraces me.

On this day, April second of the seven hundred and fifty-fifth year, we inter the bodies of twelve pilgrims. Death took them through violence and in the depths of night, fraught with terror and peril. They fought for themselves and others but paid the ultimate price. They have been buried in the southern cemetery of Fallen Crest Abbey, with all honors due to warriors of the light for they fought to protect the abbey against evil.

Their names are as follows.

Édouard Lévêque

Andrien Bret

Absolon Roy

Roch Coste

Albert Chaput

Michel Daniel

Yves Coste

Oda Perreault

Antoine Savatier

Philippe Faucheux

Paschal Dufour

Anatole Bret

May the Shepherd guide their souls to everlasting bliss, to the comforts of home and family which they will never again know in this world. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.

755 CC, Apr 2nd

To the esteemed Princeps Helvetius, Lord of Westshire.

I must write to you with the utmost urgency. I hope my previous letter has reached you about the current visit of Prince Gabriel of Vassermark. A most tragic turn of events has plagued the abbey, and I plead for your intercession in force. The night before I pen this missive, the men camped outside the abbey were besieged by a force most foul.

We came upon their bodies too late, already broken like kindling sticks and dashed upon the ground. Grown men, warriors of Vassermark, they were. Even as I write this, they are still digging graves and patrolling the woods in force for whatever foul creature killed them. Prince Gabriel’s force is large and mighty, true, but I fear that they, who are strangers to this land, will not find the monster.

Not only is it a mark against our hospitality, but I fear that if they do not find the monster they will protect themselves and retreat in the name of protecting the prince. He has no honor I can appeal to. Should that happen, the abbey will have no forces to turn against this unknown behemoth that slew twelve armed men.

What can be said of the monster with honesty is very little. It came in the night, beneath the light of the waning moon. I wonder if the unusual quiet of the abbey drew it in, out of some sense of security. For over a week, the Vassish have terrorized the night with their noise and the first night they did not, this thing crept in among their ranks.

It has the strength to crush a man’s skull like a walnut. Whether it is impervious to blades, intangible, or superhuman, we do not know; but despite drawing their weapons, none of the Vassish were able to wound the creature. Or, if they did wound it, it did not bleed. Most disturbing, but perhaps the most actionable, is the footprints left behind. They were beyond any human frame and I fear they can only belong to a troll from the north.

One of our guests, a northman who may know what he speaks of, called it a grendel. I hesitate to include such rumors in a message to you, my liege, but forewarned is fore-armed. He believes a lone troll has migrated down from the tundras and now makes lair somewhere in the marshy woods near the abbey. If this is true, then I fear the Vassish will not know how to fight such a creature.

I must beg that you send a company of knights to investigate the matter and bring us peace.

Yours faithfully,

Abbey Master Peter Montoya

755 CC Apr 2nd

I do not understand this Prince Gabriel. Twelve of his men perish in an attack from a troll, at least we believe it to be a troll. Slaughtered like invalids, like slaves thrown into an arena against gladiators. Now he finds some spirit of righteous manhood inside himself. He spent the whole day pacing around the farm fields, hither and tither on his horse, as his men ranged afield with swords in hand looking for the beast.

Swords!

What rubbish. They need spears. Boar hunting spears. They might run into boars they’d do better against a troll than a sword. These westerners don’t know a thing. What is to be done if it kills more of them? He’ll want to set fire to the forest. He’d spit at the world and learn that a damp forest doesn’t burn. Wouldn’t that put a stick in his eye?

I can’t believe that just yesterday I would have done anything to be rid of him, eating through all the stores of food the abbey has collected. Now I fear that he may leave. Of course, if it is a man-eater, so many fat bodies heading south may take the troll with them, but what if it stays? Who would defend the abbey?

The bodies we buried today, hastily and hardly annointed, linger in my mind. We had no coffins to put them in, and we barely had all of their parts to bundle up. By western tradition, they should have been buried at sea if possible, but they are in the central kingdoms and will have to be content with our traditions. The gods are siblings afterall. Still, those men hardly deserved to die. There was nothing unusual about them beyond normal soldierliness. I still don’t believe they should have been here in the first place, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t victims. I suppose their reward is our tending to their graves for the coming years. I hope they do not rage at Shepherd when she greets them.

The living are another matter.

The northman is spreading rumors among the brothers. I do not know if he is doing it on purpose or if it is circumstantial. After seeing what he did at the dinner, I cannot trust his lying tongue. It was in the kitchen, while he peeled potatoes and sweated by the fire, he told Brother Anthony of grendels.

I am certain that he is dramatizing. He is telling legends and enjoying the telling of them. While I can believe that a troll has made it this far south, he would have the brothers believe a bogeyman stalks the night hoping to crack their legs off and suck out the marrow.

What I do believe is that such a creature would be drawn to our fires, or rather, to the fires of the Vassish outside. The northern beasts are more than animals and if one is by his lonesome, the sight of a fire would draw it near. Trolls worship fire the way Giordanans worship death. What would he have us do? Tell the men to spend the night in darkness and the cold? I think the northman simply wants to see the westerners afraid. He has nothing to fear sleeping within the walls of the abbey.

More than the grendel–the troll. I should call it a troll. More than the troll, what haunts me as I write this nightly journal is the bird I saw. Black as ink and larger than any eagle I have ever laid eyes on.

No, perhaps I should write this down before I go to bed. I found myself laying awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I could hear the crunch of a troll’s footsteps. Let me put this to paper and expunge it from my mind. I will pin it down with words and trap it so that it can be a phantom no more.

Leomund Tolzi, the northman, said that a grendel is more than a lone troll. A troll alone is the easiest to hunt and kill, the safest to duel for honor and glory. A lone troll is one that has survived being alone. Tautology of course. What it means is that the troll’s family has been slain, sometimes by another herd but often by men. The grendel bears that grudge, smoldering inside him and warms himself with it. In dark nights, when a herd of trolls should be gathered with one another, surrounding a fire, a grendel is alone for he has no family and he has no one to sing with.

Thus, his nights are quiet, and even seasoned hunters cannot find him. Thus, a grendel learns guile and cunning while he grows and matures in strength. Often, the first sign that a grendel is in the area is the massacre he creates. Often of cattle, sometimes of men.

And it is a rare grendel indeed that has been marked by the gods. Too rare to exist I think.

There. I feel silly for even having written this down. It is a Skaldish thing and I am of Westshire. What’s more, the men are noisy and on guard tonight. The abbey is effectively surrounded by an army. I will sleep tonight.

Legends of the North by Sean Cainwicks

Excerpt from page 67

I want to stress that I have never seen any credible source to certify that a mere troll, mighty as they may be, received a blessing from the gods. There are legends a plenty, notably about the Fire King which was so far in the past that the difference between apocryphal and reality is moot, but the best physical proof is nothing more than a stretched out bit of leather in the royal treasury of Skaldheim. There are several written sources from scholars of known history who claim to have inspected the troll hide and confirmed that the marking upon it was of a divine sigil and not some posthumous tattoo. However, not only do the reports differ on the recreation of the marking but Skaldish historians cannot be trusted. It is a well documented fact that the kings of the north change their records to suit their current needs. This goes for ancient treaties as well as grain harvests. Nothing is too petty for their meddling, but more can be read on that elsewhere.

As this text concerns itself with the legends, let me begin with an explanation of troll behavior. They are family creatures simply put, but with a war like disposition. Unlike humans, their kings, if you’ll forgive the analogy, take the lead. To speak more literally, the father of the herd is the first to fight for territory, for food, against humans or what have you. These war events become great brawls with chest thumping and bugling before they start smashing each others skulls apart with whatever is on hand. Curiously, they display a sort of honor. If the fight is consensual between the parties they will fight on even footing and approach empty handed. However, should circumstances lead to an attack on one herd’s den things are much different. The defendants have a tendency to pull burning logs from their firepit and use them as scalding clubs. The thick sap of the pines in the north can make these very viscous weapons. The stench when such a log is quenched in the lifeblood of a troll lingers for weeks after. On the other hand, the attackers will try to announce themselves with a volley of rocks like a rudimentary siege bombardment. Chaos, of course, ensues.

This behavior is held as common proof that most troll attacks on human settlements are not war behavior. When molesting a farmer, the trolls like to merely corner their four-legged quarry in a field and smash the animals’ head with a rock. Humans find typical success in running away, though their homes will often be torn apart in their absence. When hunters attempt to cull trolls in the area, that is when problems arise.

As I mentioned earlier, the eldest troll is the first to engage. Should he perish, his sons and daughters may attempt to flee. This creates groups of immature trolls not yet wise to survival. They don’t know how to hunt their own game and they bear resentment. The easiest source of food just so happens to be the little creatures that took its family from it.

They raid and maraud and kill most any human they set their sights on until they are finally put down. For this reason, the northmen must be very thorough when tracking down their quarry, to ensure that all of them are slain. In the worst case scenario, a single male will escape. Depending on the weather, he may become untraceable. Normally a herd is tracked by the sounds of their bugling at night, but a lone troll remains silent and more difficult measures must be taken to find it.

This all brings me to the legend of the first grendel. Not to be confused with the generic term, they’re all references to the original as contaminated by the passing of the years as it may be. Grendel, as best as I can place it, originates from the first century, a very barbaric time in the north. The modern reader might be forgiven for thinking that Skaldheim always had roads and walled cities and castles and the like. Those are in fact recent additions. In the first century, the northmen lived in villages. They elected chiefs during wartime votes and then only gave him the right to oversee assemblies. The only standing guard he kept were his friends and sons, and they were not guards so much as guests and family.

According to the poem, a translation of which is available in the appendices of this book(1), the year previously the northmen had pillaged the south. Depending on the particular rendition of the poem, this either meant Westshire, Portacheval, or perhaps Drachenreach. Church records are incomplete due to more recent wars, raids, and fires, but what survives indicates that such marauding occurred every few years, so this historical fact does little to narrow the possible times. Regardless, the story goes that the king, King Haelfbear, declined to raid the south once more, having done so the year previous.

One of his jarls took umbrage, claiming that the king had kept too much of the treasure himself and had been miserly with his rewards. After leaving the harvest festival in an uproar, the king sent to have the man brought back for a new assembly as was the king’s right. The jarl was never seen alive again. The messenger found the bloody ruins of the jarl’s longhouse. The men ripped apart and the women ravaged. The stench of troll polluted the air.

King Haelfbear may have feuded with the jarl, but the jarl was his bannerman nonetheless. He declared it a fortune that they had not exhausted themselves in the south for mere gold. There was a price of blood to be paid in the north. The king rallied his bannermen and bid their wives safety. They marched north, following the troll’s tracks and so began the winter of Grendel.

No surviving copies have their appendices intact.