Total pages in book: 192
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
And it was so painstakingly conserved, it looked brand new.
I’d never seen a garment of this age so well presented.
“You can touch this one,” Aleksei said. “With the gloves.”
I tipped my head back to look at him in surprise.
“It’s also Queen Mathilde’s,” he shared. “From 1325. The trolls had invaded. As I’m sure you learned in history class, on our continent, there were nine realms then. They often clashed, disputing territory, boundaries, the legitimacy of kings or queens. Any event could be twisted into a grievance. Case in point, infamously, the King of Cliff’s Mountain once declared war due to a thunderstorm he swore was cast on his realm by neighboring Day’s Rise.”
“But the Troll Invasion stopped these petty skirmishes,” I put in.
He inclined his head. “For a time. They had to band together to defeat a common foe.”
“And in the end, the four monarchs who were credited with vanquishing the trolls, sending what was left of them back to their boats, divvied up the land and created Night’s Fall, Sky’s Edge, Land’s End and Dawn’s Break,” I concluded our shared history recitation.
But I loved that he started talking about it, drawing me in.
It was giving me all sorts of ideas about what the feel of the costumes should be for the vid.
He nodded, moved us down the line and ordered up another drawer.
It opened, and there it was.
Troll skin.
Right before me.
Troll skin.
“Not our suits, I’ll show you those in a minute,” Aleksei said. “But these are strips and samples that I thought might help you build your textiles.”
He thought right.
“Can I have the gloves?” I asked eagerly.
“You don’t need the gloves, darling,” he murmured, reaching into the drawer and selecting a largish strip of greenish-gray scaly hide.
He offered it to me.
“I shouldn’t—” I began.
“It’s virtually indestructible.”
I knew that.
However.
“That’s why it’s so valuable, along with its scarcity,” he went on. “Why it was so difficult to defeat them, even if it’s since been estimated their capacity for thought and logic was so low, strategy for them was impossible. Their invasion wasn’t tactical. It was instinctual. It was about the survival of their race. Multitudes of scientists have gone back to the isle they abandoned, and they speculate that the trolls had raped the resources of their land to such an extent, they’d go extinct if they remained. In order to survive, they needed new horizons. Their boats were decidedly elementary. It’s projected that at least three quarters of their population drowned before they even reached the shores of the Four Realms.”
“It was also why their invasion was so terrifying,” I put in. “There was no reason to it. It was widespread kill, rape, burn.” I made a face. “And eat.”
His lips tipped up at my expression. “Definitely a common enemy when they considered babies, breasts and male genitalia delicacies.”
I made an even bigger face.
He chuckled and shook the skin at me.
Hesitantly, holding my breath, I took it.
It was heavier than I expected. Thicker. Rougher. It seemed, when looking at pics of it, like the scales of a fish, one overlapping the other. This wasn’t the case. It was unbroken and rippled, but the ripples weren’t random. They had a pattern.
“Considering it doesn’t even decompose, it’s impossible to wrap my mind around the stupidity of finding ways to destroy most of the supply culled from the cadavers,” I mumbled.
“Well, once the trolls were gone, the rest of us started fighting again. It was only the Starknight House that had the bright idea to stitch the skin into armor. The rest of them experimented on it, tried to use it in rituals and spells, thinking it was magic, but they only managed to weaken it, which eventually meant it was destroyed.” A wicked grin hit his lips. “Which of course sent my ancestors scouring the realms to grab as much of it as they could.”
“Something that bought us the name of Starthieves.”
“A moniker we were quite proud of, and still are.”
This was true. Those of the Fall thought we were very clever doing that. Then again, we were. Between our dragons and that armor, it made us nearly undefeatable in future conflicts.
“Do you believe the rest of them perished in the Dolphin Sea?” I asked.
“Yes,” he stated, sweeping away centuries of conspiracy theories that some realms (especially ours) held live trolls, experimented on them and bred them for future military use. “For centuries, anthropologists, beastiologists, marine biologists and well-funded fortune hunters have scoured the seabed for thousands of miles around the Four Realms. And they’ve found multitudes of troll bones and pieces of their weapons on the sea floor. Both to the east of us, which gives credence to the theory many were lost on their journey here, and to the west, which was the direction they took when they retreated. It’s a long voyage to the Six Realms. They didn’t make it.”