Excerpt: Konmos and the Kobold

This is a world where magic thrives.

It hasn't always, though. There was a time, not too long ago at all, when magic was the domain of a select few who chose to study it - or those even luckier ones to whom it came as a natural gift. These few, whether natural-born sorcerers or the students of mage guilds and churches, hoarded it as a closely-kept secret. Magic was rare, and a valued resource where it was to be found.

So when the Last Company came to the End of the Road and unleashed the magic that had been locked away from the world, it came as a complete shock. While the Emperor maintained his hold - those who had magic already certainly didn't lose their power, and the Emperor had more than anyone - many of the smaller counties, held by jealous nobles, rose and fell faster than the ocean in a storm. The Emperor had always encouraged the powerful overtaking the weak, and this doctrine never saw more use than during the hundred days following what the more learned magical scholars called the Great Wellspring.

Those hundred days were the most violent Tasmisene had seen in millennia. Average soldiers found themselves able to perform great physical feats merely through the focus and discipline that they had previously drilled to achieve, while sneak thieves and cutpurses discovered a sort of power over the shadows that they lived and worked in. Most damaging, however, were the cultists who discovered that making pacts with malign entities really did give them a sort of occult power - though there were those who had bound these powers before, now any madman with a pack blade and a crazed gleam in his eye could draw strength from the Beings Beyond. And, as mankind is a selfish race, many descended to using these powers for evil.

For those hundred days, chaos reigned. Evil men drunk with power fought with guards whose newfound abilities did almost as much peripheral damage as what they actually intended. Many died, and many more fled or went insane. Finally, the Emperor took notice at the begging of his nobles, and unleashed his forces across the land. His power still held, and that of his servants - the Wardens.

It had been traditional for each Company who walked the Road - a long, blasted expanse of earth that until recently had been locked under an evil curse - to become the new guardians of the realm as Wardens. The Last Company duly accepted these appointments, though they demanded that a previous Warden named Sibyron be kept on as well. These now were the folk that the Emperor ordered forth into his Empire, and they wrought a kind of peace - mostly through the efforts of Malennul and Sana Orm'Kal, the two most prominent magic-users of the Last Company. Various schools and guilds were establish to help those who could not control their powers, and life in the Empire gradually returned to normal.

But not all Tasmisene was ruled by the Emperor, and not all of it suffered so little. There were on that continent two other powers. The first was the Orcish Nation, a loose confederation of the semi-nomadic orcish tribes. The orcs had long been accustomed to one or perhaps two of their people holding any sort of mystical power, but when entire tribes developed such abilities - orcs were notoriously powerful warriors, even before the Wellspring - they too were thrown into chaos. A bloody anarchy prevailed for nearly an entire year, as Kurzun Sunblood - the Orcish Warden, and the only orcish member of the Last Company - strived vainly to build some kind of peace. He finally ended the war by brutally slaughtering an entire village by himself; though this did not win him many accolades for kindness, it was the traditional way of the orcs and was respected. Soon they too came to peace with their new powers.

Not so the minotaurs. Long at war with the orcs and everyone else around them, the minotaurs were completely divided as to what to do. Many, predictably, saw the Wellspring as an exploitable advantage in their eternal battle with practically everything else breathing - minotaurs are not so different from humans, after all. The other side saw magic as an abomination and heresy against Those Above, and proclaimed it an evil to be stamped out. However, any minotaur not fanatical is extremely practical, and the practical thing occurred: those who claimed magic a heresy were very promptly killed, and those who found it practical proclaimed a new age for the minotaur race.

The only problem was what this new age would consist of. Many of the great minotaur leaders had been slaughtered during the Purging of the Heretics. (Let it never be said that minotaur historians have no sense of irony.) The great minotaur nation was gradually coming apart at the seams, with the eternal strife between the individual clans being aired in a very open and very violent way for the first time in centuries. Clan leader after clan leader fell to the scheming of the others, all hoping to ascend to the Great Throne and to supreme and undisputed leadership.

So, with all of these great and high-born minotaurs clamoring after the throne, it would seem a perfect time for Fate to quirk an eyebrow and create one of the great accidents of history. For this is the story of the second Great King of the Minotaurs and the companion that helped make him so, and it begins with a very angry warrior knee-deep in muck.