Equinox of Autumn approached in the land of Aboregale, an outland to the great kingdom of Trome. Three vigorous men: Saoel Forkbeard, Chin Le Tang and Utanba Tu, rode in league with a realm of mighty warriors. Trome had become ruled by a menacing leader, Lord Feydor Antonavich Volki, who became both feared and venerated, by the governing army, as a heartless oppressor to human freedom. The trio journeyed into a northern wasteland in quest of adventure, slaves and treasure, to support and glorify their powerful kingdom to the South.
Aboregale was a diverse land of scattered forests and pasture land. Ridged mountains protruded variably amid harsh, wide, highlands. Its impenetrable hunting grounds sustained many forms of preeminent game. Above others, notably, were superb stocks of deciduously antlered, migratory mammals.
Aboregale was the bed of an eclipsed civilization from which Saoel Forkbeard's ancestors had arisen centuries before. Baneful winter threatened the land with a cheerless, desolate, adversity as mournful gusts of inclement air spliced discordantly through the depopulated landscape. Aboregale had become inhabited by scattered bands of hunters, led largely by the country's expatriated combatants from a long war with Trome and tyrannical forces of Lord Volki. In its fifth year, violence that overcame the domain cast a morbid shadow. In wake of the war of conquest, instigated by their resolved overlord in the South, marauders brought methodical murder and anguish upon the remaining provinces of Aboregale. A few ostracized revolutionaries, from unstable armies in Trome, found asylum with the contentious dissenters from Aboregale who fought Feydor Volki's persistent despotism. Infrequent hardy agriculturists drew subsistence from Aboregale's cold and generally hostile flat plateaus that stretched endlessly over icy tundra.
Beneath flat hooves of horses, marshlands glistened. Rancorous calls from wild geese, as they winged southward, admonished changing seasons to three inimical men as they rode in search of adventure. The smell of cold ocean air, from a bay, hundreds of miles away, became tinged with piquant salt sapor. Riders tugged at bridles. Their haltered, intrepid, mounts blew great clouds of steam from blaring nostrils in the cool and brittle morning air.
Sense of ordeal gave way to curiosity as they approached a wooden barn. Leather over dirty wool, shielded by metal armor, stopped cold morning air as it descended form mountainous crags in shivery shifting squalls. Intemperate wind bit into bare skin, of the small antagonistic group's face, as they looked suspiciously about for signs of inhabitants. Glistening broadswords swung in colorful scabbards, with eloquently garlanded handles, at the invaders' sides in anxious anticipation of battle. Energetic bows, ascendingly ornamented, with quivers of lethal arrows, waved from the horsemen's backs as they scanned a fenced pasture filled with skittish sheep.
The owner of the barn hid apprehensively in a loft, behind bales of wheat stalks, and watched the encroaching band of men. It was obvious the men were from Trome: raiding mercenaries on a mission of marauding and plunder. He hoped they would pass through and give no heed to his unpretentious tract of land apportioned to the raising and breeding of sheep. Dwellers of Aboregale lived in perpetual fear of the kingdom to their south.
One of the robust men descended a fidgety ashen steed and paced into the dilapidated refuge to prove its vacancy. The unnerved herdsman held his breath and edged toward an orifice above the door. Radiant morning light poured through weathered loose planks of ax hewn sides to the man's barn. An alarmed pigeon fluttered between dilapidated frames of railing. It flew out the roof, into morning sunlight, in surprised agitation.
The strenuously muscled despoiler walked to a far side of the barn. Utanba Tu stood alert, wittily evaluating the defensibility of the structure. He became momentarily comforted by warmth and protection of decaying posts and neglected timbers that comprised the primordial shelter. The shrinking keeper, of a ruminant flock of mammals, knocked inadvertently against a wide pronged manure fork tilted next to a wall. Disturbance, on the unpartitioned floor over the three men's heads, notified the interlopers of the animal tender's proximity.
The strained herder watched fancifully for an opportunity to circumvent detection. The attendant waited for a favorable moment then jumped athletically from an elevated window. With a limber and pliable landing he bypassed the riders' horses then ran.
Terrified, the tender raced toward a small stream in a concealing thicket of trees that skirted the farm's boundary. Forkbeard, a vigorous horseman, unfastened his bow. He unerringly drew a shaft from the quiver mounted next to his bridle. In conformity to the deviating path of the hovel's fleeing occupant, a straight narrow stave from his longbow let fly with iniquitous accuracy.
In solitude of still morning, flight stabilizing feathers from the arrow droned loudly in a destructive, lethal, hum. The devastating projectile caught him dangerously off guard; the unarmed herdsman fell with an agonized scream, into twisting bushes, on the brink of a concealing copse of shrubs. The archer's horse neighed in conformation to cruel and cynical scoffing of the senseless villain's miscreant accomplice.
"You blunderer," admonished Chin Le Tang, the insentient evildoer's confederate. "You should have saved that work for my ax!"
The dissolute bowman rode to the disposed body of the harmless herder and ruefully twisted his bloodied shaft from the dead flock tender's back. Utanba, the third draconian rover, emerged from the unfortunate dweller's barn with two chickens. The hardy trio spent the rest of the morning cooking the birds, discussing their determination.
As rugged Mongolian tribesman who comprised his race, the archer's compatriot, Chin Le, reveled in the group's plundering in the land of Aboregale. He was the vigorous descendant of a barbarous leader in Northern China. The vehement Manchurian horseman journeyed to Trome, at the instruction of his emperor, to learn about the kingdom and its methods in waging war. "We could have taken the herder back to Trome with us," advocated the Chinese mercenary.
"He had no horses," justified the bowman. The archer, Saoel Forkbeard, was a hulking Scandinavian with unpleasant manners and loathsome habits. He displayed objectionable diplomacy. "The old man would have proved a useless warrior to us. He was too old to become trained as a slave and too complaisant to survive the test of battle."
The third despoiler, Utanba, a swarthy black skinned Bantu speaker complained in Turkish, "I am tired of eating mutton. I have eaten nothing but sheep for at least two weeks. Fowl is an agreeable variation. We should hunt deer before continuing in quest of slaves and treasure for Lord Volki in Trome."
Indiscriminately, the spirited and ferocious tribesman, Utanba Tu, had twice become taken slave. Captured by Turks, the once peaceful deeper of cattle became forced from his progressive culture by warring factions in North Africa on the southern border of the Sahara Desert. Utanba Tu remembered the first time he had seen a camel. He marveled at the way men floated eloquently over the sand on backs of those staunch ships of the desert. After many years he learned the language and ways of men in two unfamiliar and suppressive environments. During military expeditions into Moslem domain, where he became imprisoned originally, the unwieldy black man had become captured and taken to Trome by Feydor Volki's menacing army. Against intractable bands of defiant rebels who opposed the administrator of Trome's oppressive leadership Utanba fought ferociously. He had become rendered freedom after demonstration of his proficiency in battle.
They disregarded the tender's plentiful herd of submissive, domesticated mammals in favor of tastier wild game. The unlikely group of exultant inquisitors looked cynically around them for signs of other inhabitants. The untamed Scandinavian's vindictiveness extolled oppression and brutal savagery of the men's venerated monarchs who dwelled in the southern kingdom.
The Caucasoid archer ruffled brutally thick fingers through curly brown hair of his matted beard. He evaluated his partners and their preparedness to yield to his ruthless and unmerciful leadership. Puffs of white smoke from their cooking fire extended upward while surges of wind continued in a piercing, successive downfall from cliffs overlooking the barn. The sullied flock tender's dead eyes stared with quiescence at the ground. His bloodied wool tunic wore stained testimony to the slayer's crude injustice.
Aboregale was a country of nomadic hunting bands. Where waterways lead into the ocean, reconnoitering stalkers of reindeer and elk made their camps. Amid rudimentary shelter, constructed of wood and animal skins, dwellers of the once superior nation gathered in defeated effigy of a formerly great civilization. Toppled fortresses constructed of colossal limestone and granite blocks stood pillaged and enshrouded in moss green mantels. The stupendous strongholds stood spoiled, both by the sands of time and hands of multitudes of men who died defending the gargantuan stone emplacements.
Dreary primeval walls reinforced cracked and battered stratification of resistant sedimentary rock. In ancient battlements and ramparts of Aboregale's ravaged castles were ghosts of thousands of lost souls. Commemorations to the men's apparitions became remembered in narratives of their now subjugated ancestors. Vanquished survivors of grievous calamity that befell Aboregale clung to survival among parties of treacherous marauders. In trackless tundra and forests of the expelled culture they dwelled. Neglected parapets and dilapidated stone fortifications sparkled with flickering bits of quartz exposed by erosion of water against the battered limestone. As if crushed and broken fossils of long extinct beasts, the dark portals of towers, lost to the power who built them, gaped blankly over a forbidding land.
Dispelled denizens, victims of Aboregale's compelling submission to conquest by Lord Volki's army in Trome, wailed in fateful sorrow over loss of their generative culture. They hid in cold forests. Men clustered in frightened and heedful factions of the demolished country's surviving population.
Qualmish leaders of dirty and unhealthy groups of men and women clung narrowly to survival. It was a time of trauma and great despair for their populace. During dark years, that followed the downfall of Aboregale's fecund period of creative fabrication, legends became passed down to the survivors of its mishap. The story of the holocaust, by a grief stricken remainder of the populace, relayed the myth of a mighty soldier who was to save Aboregale and return it to its rightful rulers.
In the last days of Aboregale's altercation with abhorrent invaders to the South a young man, Thorvald Barbidal, fought ruthlessly against contemptible assailants from Trome. Thorvald, hero to their saga, was to bring new standards to Aboregale's war and the carnal barbarity of assailants from Trome. Myth of his survival sparked hope among dispirited members of Aboregale's devastated citizenry.
Saoel Forkbeard, Chin Le Tang and Utanba Tu, the domineering trio from Lord Volki's fortune hunting legion of self-indulgent henchmen, rode cautiously into the sinister black forests of Aboregale. The Scandinavian mariner positioned himself well behind, Utanba, the zealous and energetically venturesome African animal tracker. The perceptive Negro veteran, gracious amber pigmentation eclipsed by formidable European armor, rode at a distance. In front of the bearded, light skinned, barbarian he continued. Confident, the tribesman sensitively sniffed the chill air for redolence of game. His decisive intuition lingered over a broken tree branch. Alert to a deceptively overturned stone, the