A preview · 7:48am Nov 10th, 2017
Wearing a heavy greatcoat, Manfrit approached with his hands folded behind his back. Dim thought the giant looked rather reserved, dignified, but was still a disgusting primitive. Like Captain Melvin, Manfrit smoked a pipe, and he puffed away on it now. Reaching out with one hand, his flesh and blood one, he pulled his pipe away from his lips and coughed.
“Down here, at the southern end of the Worldwall Mountains, we have the Sea of Granite. Make no mistake, this is a sea like any other, and just as dangerous to cross. It’s not safe to sail over this mountains… the only real safe passage is this long valley and Istanbull.”
“Why are the mountains dangerous?” Dim asked.
The older minotaur smiled and his eyes gleamed with the faint city lights as they grew closer. “Stories. Stories make them dangerous. There are weird places in the mountains, places where ships don’t fly and begin to sink. Places where strange lights will attack all things living and strip the flesh off of their bones. There are all of these fantastic stories, and almost all of them have some grain of truth to them, some terrible fate promised to those who violate the skies. A long time ago, stories were told about a place called Skyreach. Nothing that ever went there returned. Those stories proved true, and the Howling Peaks, the location of fabled Skyreach, is now a scorched crater miles wide where nothing grows.”
The roach of Dim’s cigarette burned from existence and turned to ash on the wind.
“Starhome used to be a city of the alicorns,” Manfit said as he waved his smoking pipe around. “You’ll see soon enough. We minotaurs took the city a long, long time ago, but it was abandoned when we found it, a ruin filled with monsters. Mostly eye tyrants… gazers. These mountains were overrun with chaos. The most twisted, most terrifying monsters you could imagine roamed these peaks and these valleys, and many still do. This is not a safe place… there is only the illusion of safety.”
“No offense meant, but how do minotaurs fight gazers?” Dim asked.
“A good question,” Manfrit replied with a chuckle. “Mirrored shields. The different rays of the eyebeasts can be reflected with mirrored, magical shields that we minotaurs can forge. It took us over a hundred years to claim the city and it claimed the lives of tens of thousands. This is why we minotaurs believe that we own this land now, that we are entitled. We paid for it with blood. However, as you will soon see, Istanbull is welcome to all who would live in peace. It wasn’t always like this though… but these are things that you will learn more of later.”
So much more to learn later.
