ER

The tiny hamlet of Er is nestled comfortably at the base of the Mithicus Mountains on its western side, richly-endowed with animal farms. The quiet homes of Er had little need for anything from the outside world. The northern Mithicus peaks provided shade on the hotter days, and run-off from the mountains had water enough for the entire village. The people of Er were a peculiar people, not to mention chronically lazy and overweight. Probably nowhere else in all of the Westlands did so many people live off of domesticated wiskus-meat. It was a rare family that could partake of yipple, or an occasional blue thrub from the Bor River two days' journey to the north. A native of that village without the love of wiskus-meat was a starved native indeed.

The first to rise each morning were the older woman of the village, long practices in the traditional early morning ritual of preparing a decent breakfast for hungry familiy easily a dozen people too large. Of course the wealthier among this village’s natives allowed their servants to prepare much more delectable fair. (Frequently, mornings begin with the biting sound of a young child’s tearful cry upon the discovery that her favorite pet yipple had been sacrificed to feed her own parents’ nearly bottomless appetite.)

It seemed that everybody in Er was related in some way or another. At the very least, everyone claimed a heritage intimately linked with the distant figure of Prince Ump himself, in the days when Er had enjoyed slightly greater stature as one of the areas bonded to the powerful city-state of Pheebor. Even then, the people of this village had always been uniquely separate and highly proud of that fact.

396 BE saw the downfall of Prince Ump and the complete isolation of Er as Pheebor met its downfall at the hands of the Borpheans. Little is known of Er's role in this event, save that they took up arms as an ally to Pheebor. Afterwards, Er did not get many visitors of any kind, save a specific instance when ambassadors from Borphee had come, seeking to gain power over the entire land from coast to mountin. Er had of course turned the ambassadors away, without even so much as a “Come again soon!”

In 398 GUE, Er was the first sacrifice of the Nezgeth tribe to end the deadly six-year famine. For the first time since the fall of Pheebor, the proud people of Er prepared for battle. But the brief moments were not enough. It would have taken an eternity for the overweight, defenseless farmers of that tiny village to ready themselves against the Kovalli hordes, for a dozen of the dark-skinned warriors were easily a match for the entire population of Er. The animals were the first to die. The children were ignored. The women were subjected to the most brutal forms of Nezgeth sexual wrath. And after the first wave of Kovalli invaders made short work of what little resistance was to be found, the rest of the tribe descended in a giant predatorial cloud onto the village. The Er provisions were raided and completely devoured. A dozen different campsites sprung up in the immediate valley area.

Of the Erfolk, a family managed to escape in a copse south of the village, and a young teenage girl managed to hide in an attic. Er still lived, but an Er only a twisted and misshapen caricature of its proud former self. The grandfathers were gone, beaten to death, leaving no one behind to tell the ancient and glorious, albeit quite distorted tales of Er’s firm stand against the eastern fops from Borphee. In the years to come, the Er storytellers would never seem to be particularly truthful or precise about the details of the day. While Quendoran history as a whole would speak of a devastating series of battles that saw a Kovalli tribe called the Nezgeth come to dominate the entire countryside, Er natives subscribed to their own peculiar rendition of the events.

In a little over two-and-a-half centuries from the massacre, the armies of Pseudo-Duncanthrax came marching in from the north. The invaders found a village of people speaking a peculiar tongue, writing little, and reading less. The leaders of that invasion from a the distant Egreth, upon getting to know the quaint little settlement of Er, heard ancient village legends, passed on from the oldest uncles to the newest cousins, telling of Er’s last great military stand on an early sunny morning so distant in time. Those future story tellers passed on the glorious deeds of Er’s noble fight against a similar invader, another vicious conqueror bent on destruction.

SOURCE(S): Zylon the Aged