Chapter One
The Thane and his men were in their beds, sleeping off their drinking session, when little Dagfinnur Fanngeirsen heard the Orcs bang at the door and burst into the room. He wasted no time in defending the Hall, he ran over the the weapons rack and before the Orcs could do anything, he was under them and slashed their bellies wide open and killed the invaders. The men woke up and saw the Orc corpses by the shivering ten-year old. "By the gods! You saved us!" said the Thane when he saw what had transpired. "But we'll have to fix the door." said the Thane and the men labored throughout the night to fix the door and they added extra bolts to the door to keep the Orcs out. The ten-year old gave suggestions as to what would keep the Orcs from busting down the door again and they followed his suggestions. "You are the future Thane." said the Thane to his ten-year old son on that night. Several years later, Dagfinnur took his wilderness trial and went deep into the wilds and set up his lean-to by a stand of giant ceders. The area was well-known to him, he and his brothers had played in the area in times past, there was a narrow slot canyon with a swift river thirty feet bellow and there was only one area it could be crossed, at a log that was felled over the narrowest point, however a storm had swept away this log and now it was a chasm that could be jumped only by the bravest warrior. He backed up and ran at the chasm and jumped, easily cleared the dangerous void and landed on the other side. He walked to a cave and looked inside for anything useful. He saw remains of a campfire and nothing else. He walked up a steep hill and came to a cairn of bones and he saw that they were human bones, and the bite marks where fresh. "Ice Trolls!" he whispered. He quickly drew his sword and looked around for an Ice Troll and heard a grunting bellow the cliff. He saw that two Ice Trolls were eating one Nord and another was sitting in a wicker cage. He drew his bow and arrow and shot both of the Ice Trolls dead and freed the other Nord. "By the gods! I thought I was a goner for sure!" said the Nord. The Nord ran off without saying "thank you" and the rest of the wilderness trial went smoothly after that. He passed and saw his first battle a year later. 600 Orcs tried to cross the mountains to attack the Hall so the Thane and his 100 warriors walked up the mountain and flanked them from behind and scattered them so it was easy to kill the fleeing Orcs. Dagfinnur killed 50 Orcs that day. He decided to become a freebooter since the 20 year lull in the war had began.
Chapter Two.
Dagfinnur and Elvar the Left-handed rode down to Nordlandia as freebooters with the intent of making themselves rich by collecting bounties. They established themselves in the Hold Capitol in a bunkhouse and rode out daily to the Royal Hall, looking for bounties to fill. They didn't have much success at it, since the bandits kept running away from their camps. They left Nordlandia and went to the coast of Vyirlundia and asked if any Captains were leading raids into the Kelti Kingdoms. They found the fishing town of Edvinborg whose dragon ships outnumbered it's fishing ships. They spoke with several Captains on the dockside and Sea-thane Eyvaldur Eyvaldursen took them on as raiders. Rowing the dragon-ship out to where the winds could be used was hard work but Dagfinnur was no stranger to hard work and toil. The men unfurled the sails and they sailed around the Continent to the Kelti domain and sailed up the Ardan River and reached the summer fort where the raiding bands were gathered under a common banner. "This is Aeolwulf's Fort, a Nord built this and named it. We have a hall and barracks within. Aeolwulf himself is the lord of this place. In return for his hosting us, he gets 10% of the loot gained in raids. He also gets 2% of the slaves taken. Also this is the biggest slave market on the Continent." said the Sea-thane to his men. King Coineach even pays us millions in gold to "go away" and we play along and then we start up the raids again." said the Sea-thane to the men. The whole Castle was built of local stone and was built in a way that kept attackers from taking the Castle. The first raid was a settlement up the river called Kian. The Sea-Thanes and their crews rowed the ships up the river and waited till the twilight hour to attack the town. The Vyir and Nords fell on the town with screams of bloody murder and the villagers were scattered while the Vyir and Nords plundered the town. Some of the Vyir men kept the townsfolk under watch in a nearby building while the raiders took everything. Then the Vyir looked at the men and women and took only the strongest of them as slaves and left the rest. "I suspect the King will have an army to the area soon." said a Sea-thane. They loaded up the loot and plunder and the slaves into the Dragon-ships and sailed down back to the Castle. "The raids are daily, some men choose to take a rest at the Fort but there is money to be had lads!" said the Sea-thane. The men cheered at that and after a week of non-stop raiding, Dagfinnur had enough gold and silver to pay a dowry. The Sea-thane heard of his request to return to Vyirlundia and he loaded his Dragon-ship with slaves and the men returned to Vyirlundia. Dag got 12% off the sale of each slave and he walked away a fairly wealthy man. He rode a new pony down to his Hall only to discover that the Hall had been burned down and his father was dead and his retainers had been scattered. Even the Kelti slaves had run away and the only inhabitants were the cows and bulls in the fields, getting fat and increasing in number daily. He rode to the Yarl to secure his title and once that was confirmed, he rode back to the farm with some newly captured slaves and rebuilt the Hall and the Barn. He rode off to the nearby Thane Aeolborger and asked for the hand of Gunhilda Aeolborgersdottir and after paying the dowry, they were married at the Temple in the nearby Hold. 200 men heard that the Hall had been rebuilt and the Thane had returned and they came to swear fealty to him and to fight his battles. Since the Frost Orcs had all but left the peninsula for the core of the Orcish Empire, the only fighting to be done was against the Frost Trolls, who built scores of village forts all over the land, hoping to reclaim what was once their Kingdom. A typical Frost troll village consisted of ten large wooden halls surrounded by a wooden pallisade, the inside of the palisade had four watch-towers with drums in them for the watchers to alarm the trolls inside of the village that the humans (or Orcs) were coming. The Frost Trolls did not use metals but instead used stone and wood to make their weapons. They wore necklaces of skulls and often had huge cairns of bones in the middle of their villages, both Orc and human. The Thanes and their armies would rain down oil-tipped lighted arrows on the villages and let the trolls burn to death within their villages. The few that escaped would be slaughtered by the Vyir Warriors. Thane Dagfinnur led his warriors in burning down fifty such villages and when not killing the Frost Trolls, they would hunt down and slaughter the Ice Trolls, the dumb cousins of the Frost Trolls. The Frost Trolls were known for collecting gold and silver coins to make into necklaces and the Thane and his men looted five million guilders in gold from the Frost Trolls. After three years, the Frost Trolls were gone from the Yarl's lands and more Thanes were able to settle the lands with their farms and Halls. Occasionally there was the stone ruins of an Orcish fort or city and the men would gather what stone they could from the ruins and bury the rest of the ruins so it could be used for grazing for cattle, sheep and ponies. The thanes would use the stones from the ruins to build stone walls around their farms and fields so they could keep out unwelcome visitors. The Thane had his slaves build thick and high stone walls around his fields and his Hall.
Chapter Three
Some Orcs from the Stone-Mountain Clan went to see the Thane and in broken Vyir they offered themselves as warriors and vassals to himself and the High Yarl. "Why? I thought you hated us." he retorted, not trusting them. "We dislike Orc Emperor even more, ancient feud. We rather fight him than support him! We fight good and farm good. Make us retainers and vassals and gods smile on you." said Dor'rock the Basher. "This is a first! Perhaps the Orcs are ready to fall. You must go to our Priests to receive baptism into the gods of the Light and renounce the gods of the darkness first." he warned. "We already did, our eyes opened and we want to be the good Orcs." said another, Jaill Hammerfist. "Then swear fealty to me, the Yarl and the High Yarl." said Thane Dagfinnur. They quickly swore fealty and the Orcs were received by the men as allies and fellow warriors. The Thane placed the fifteen Stonemoutain Bashers on his right flank in battle and after each battle, more and more Stonemountain Orcs came to his banner until they numbered forty. He expanded his Hall and added an extra table for them. The High Yarl himself went to see this new development and commended the Thane for his judgement. Pretty soon even the High Yarl had gained sixty Stonemountain Bashers who fought at his side.
The peace ended and the other Orc Clans saw the treachery of the Stonemountain Clan and attacked their forts and tried to destroy them but the Vyir came to their rescue. A string of lands owned by Stonemountain lords were annxed to Vyirlundia that year and the Vyir gained a vital invasion route into the Orcish Empire. Dagfinnur was raised to Earldoman and was sent to govern the forts in the newly gained province. He led an army of 7,000 Nords and 7,000 Vyir into the region and settled the armies into their garrison forts and built several Castles based on the one he lived in when he was a young man when he was a raider. He improved the Orcish forts and reinforced them and even built a long wall starting at G'rothnir's Rest and ending at Jar'nik's Fort far to the south. He had his garrison patrol the wall and the wall kept out further invasions from that direction, although the Orcs could still hit them from the south.
Chapter Four.
The High Yarl saw his work at the new border and raised him again to Yarl and gave him a brand-new Hold. The fort-line was given to a cousin of the High Yarl. Yarl Dagfinnur built his Hall and his Hold out of stone and even added a large tower to the city wall. The fortifications were strong enough to keep out Orcs and everything else as well. Thanes and Merchants settled in his new Hold and Yarl Dagfinnur leased the lands around the city to Thanes for farms and those incomes made him a wealthy man. He also hired engineers to look for gold and silver veins and copper veins and several were found and tapped and became mines, with all the revenue going to Yarl Dagfinnur. The engineers also built a tomb under the Hold for the Yarl and his Thanes. When Yarl Dagfinnur died at 90 years old, he was buried in an underground chamber inside of a Dragon-ship assembled for that purpose. It floated in water and was tied by chains to the walls of the chamber. The chamber was sealed off by an iron gate from the rest of the tomb, which had rooms for the Thanes in death, with their sarcophagus's and the gold vessels and silver vessels lined around the floor in the tombs.
The End.
The Thane and his men were in their beds, sleeping off their drinking session, when little Dagfinnur Fanngeirsen heard the Orcs bang at the door and burst into the room. He wasted no time in defending the Hall, he ran over the the weapons rack and before the Orcs could do anything, he was under them and slashed their bellies wide open and killed the invaders. The men woke up and saw the Orc corpses by the shivering ten-year old. "By the gods! You saved us!" said the Thane when he saw what had transpired. "But we'll have to fix the door." said the Thane and the men labored throughout the night to fix the door and they added extra bolts to the door to keep the Orcs out. The ten-year old gave suggestions as to what would keep the Orcs from busting down the door again and they followed his suggestions. "You are the future Thane." said the Thane to his ten-year old son on that night. Several years later, Dagfinnur took his wilderness trial and went deep into the wilds and set up his lean-to by a stand of giant ceders. The area was well-known to him, he and his brothers had played in the area in times past, there was a narrow slot canyon with a swift river thirty feet bellow and there was only one area it could be crossed, at a log that was felled over the narrowest point, however a storm had swept away this log and now it was a chasm that could be jumped only by the bravest warrior. He backed up and ran at the chasm and jumped, easily cleared the dangerous void and landed on the other side. He walked to a cave and looked inside for anything useful. He saw remains of a campfire and nothing else. He walked up a steep hill and came to a cairn of bones and he saw that they were human bones, and the bite marks where fresh. "Ice Trolls!" he whispered. He quickly drew his sword and looked around for an Ice Troll and heard a grunting bellow the cliff. He saw that two Ice Trolls were eating one Nord and another was sitting in a wicker cage. He drew his bow and arrow and shot both of the Ice Trolls dead and freed the other Nord. "By the gods! I thought I was a goner for sure!" said the Nord. The Nord ran off without saying "thank you" and the rest of the wilderness trial went smoothly after that. He passed and saw his first battle a year later. 600 Orcs tried to cross the mountains to attack the Hall so the Thane and his 100 warriors walked up the mountain and flanked them from behind and scattered them so it was easy to kill the fleeing Orcs. Dagfinnur killed 50 Orcs that day. He decided to become a freebooter since the 20 year lull in the war had began.
Chapter Two.
Dagfinnur and Elvar the Left-handed rode down to Nordlandia as freebooters with the intent of making themselves rich by collecting bounties. They established themselves in the Hold Capitol in a bunkhouse and rode out daily to the Royal Hall, looking for bounties to fill. They didn't have much success at it, since the bandits kept running away from their camps. They left Nordlandia and went to the coast of Vyirlundia and asked if any Captains were leading raids into the Kelti Kingdoms. They found the fishing town of Edvinborg whose dragon ships outnumbered it's fishing ships. They spoke with several Captains on the dockside and Sea-thane Eyvaldur Eyvaldursen took them on as raiders. Rowing the dragon-ship out to where the winds could be used was hard work but Dagfinnur was no stranger to hard work and toil. The men unfurled the sails and they sailed around the Continent to the Kelti domain and sailed up the Ardan River and reached the summer fort where the raiding bands were gathered under a common banner. "This is Aeolwulf's Fort, a Nord built this and named it. We have a hall and barracks within. Aeolwulf himself is the lord of this place. In return for his hosting us, he gets 10% of the loot gained in raids. He also gets 2% of the slaves taken. Also this is the biggest slave market on the Continent." said the Sea-thane to his men. King Coineach even pays us millions in gold to "go away" and we play along and then we start up the raids again." said the Sea-thane to the men. The whole Castle was built of local stone and was built in a way that kept attackers from taking the Castle. The first raid was a settlement up the river called Kian. The Sea-Thanes and their crews rowed the ships up the river and waited till the twilight hour to attack the town. The Vyir and Nords fell on the town with screams of bloody murder and the villagers were scattered while the Vyir and Nords plundered the town. Some of the Vyir men kept the townsfolk under watch in a nearby building while the raiders took everything. Then the Vyir looked at the men and women and took only the strongest of them as slaves and left the rest. "I suspect the King will have an army to the area soon." said a Sea-thane. They loaded up the loot and plunder and the slaves into the Dragon-ships and sailed down back to the Castle. "The raids are daily, some men choose to take a rest at the Fort but there is money to be had lads!" said the Sea-thane. The men cheered at that and after a week of non-stop raiding, Dagfinnur had enough gold and silver to pay a dowry. The Sea-thane heard of his request to return to Vyirlundia and he loaded his Dragon-ship with slaves and the men returned to Vyirlundia. Dag got 12% off the sale of each slave and he walked away a fairly wealthy man. He rode a new pony down to his Hall only to discover that the Hall had been burned down and his father was dead and his retainers had been scattered. Even the Kelti slaves had run away and the only inhabitants were the cows and bulls in the fields, getting fat and increasing in number daily. He rode to the Yarl to secure his title and once that was confirmed, he rode back to the farm with some newly captured slaves and rebuilt the Hall and the Barn. He rode off to the nearby Thane Aeolborger and asked for the hand of Gunhilda Aeolborgersdottir and after paying the dowry, they were married at the Temple in the nearby Hold. 200 men heard that the Hall had been rebuilt and the Thane had returned and they came to swear fealty to him and to fight his battles. Since the Frost Orcs had all but left the peninsula for the core of the Orcish Empire, the only fighting to be done was against the Frost Trolls, who built scores of village forts all over the land, hoping to reclaim what was once their Kingdom. A typical Frost troll village consisted of ten large wooden halls surrounded by a wooden pallisade, the inside of the palisade had four watch-towers with drums in them for the watchers to alarm the trolls inside of the village that the humans (or Orcs) were coming. The Frost Trolls did not use metals but instead used stone and wood to make their weapons. They wore necklaces of skulls and often had huge cairns of bones in the middle of their villages, both Orc and human. The Thanes and their armies would rain down oil-tipped lighted arrows on the villages and let the trolls burn to death within their villages. The few that escaped would be slaughtered by the Vyir Warriors. Thane Dagfinnur led his warriors in burning down fifty such villages and when not killing the Frost Trolls, they would hunt down and slaughter the Ice Trolls, the dumb cousins of the Frost Trolls. The Frost Trolls were known for collecting gold and silver coins to make into necklaces and the Thane and his men looted five million guilders in gold from the Frost Trolls. After three years, the Frost Trolls were gone from the Yarl's lands and more Thanes were able to settle the lands with their farms and Halls. Occasionally there was the stone ruins of an Orcish fort or city and the men would gather what stone they could from the ruins and bury the rest of the ruins so it could be used for grazing for cattle, sheep and ponies. The thanes would use the stones from the ruins to build stone walls around their farms and fields so they could keep out unwelcome visitors. The Thane had his slaves build thick and high stone walls around his fields and his Hall.
Chapter Three
Some Orcs from the Stone-Mountain Clan went to see the Thane and in broken Vyir they offered themselves as warriors and vassals to himself and the High Yarl. "Why? I thought you hated us." he retorted, not trusting them. "We dislike Orc Emperor even more, ancient feud. We rather fight him than support him! We fight good and farm good. Make us retainers and vassals and gods smile on you." said Dor'rock the Basher. "This is a first! Perhaps the Orcs are ready to fall. You must go to our Priests to receive baptism into the gods of the Light and renounce the gods of the darkness first." he warned. "We already did, our eyes opened and we want to be the good Orcs." said another, Jaill Hammerfist. "Then swear fealty to me, the Yarl and the High Yarl." said Thane Dagfinnur. They quickly swore fealty and the Orcs were received by the men as allies and fellow warriors. The Thane placed the fifteen Stonemoutain Bashers on his right flank in battle and after each battle, more and more Stonemountain Orcs came to his banner until they numbered forty. He expanded his Hall and added an extra table for them. The High Yarl himself went to see this new development and commended the Thane for his judgement. Pretty soon even the High Yarl had gained sixty Stonemountain Bashers who fought at his side.
The peace ended and the other Orc Clans saw the treachery of the Stonemountain Clan and attacked their forts and tried to destroy them but the Vyir came to their rescue. A string of lands owned by Stonemountain lords were annxed to Vyirlundia that year and the Vyir gained a vital invasion route into the Orcish Empire. Dagfinnur was raised to Earldoman and was sent to govern the forts in the newly gained province. He led an army of 7,000 Nords and 7,000 Vyir into the region and settled the armies into their garrison forts and built several Castles based on the one he lived in when he was a young man when he was a raider. He improved the Orcish forts and reinforced them and even built a long wall starting at G'rothnir's Rest and ending at Jar'nik's Fort far to the south. He had his garrison patrol the wall and the wall kept out further invasions from that direction, although the Orcs could still hit them from the south.
Chapter Four.
The High Yarl saw his work at the new border and raised him again to Yarl and gave him a brand-new Hold. The fort-line was given to a cousin of the High Yarl. Yarl Dagfinnur built his Hall and his Hold out of stone and even added a large tower to the city wall. The fortifications were strong enough to keep out Orcs and everything else as well. Thanes and Merchants settled in his new Hold and Yarl Dagfinnur leased the lands around the city to Thanes for farms and those incomes made him a wealthy man. He also hired engineers to look for gold and silver veins and copper veins and several were found and tapped and became mines, with all the revenue going to Yarl Dagfinnur. The engineers also built a tomb under the Hold for the Yarl and his Thanes. When Yarl Dagfinnur died at 90 years old, he was buried in an underground chamber inside of a Dragon-ship assembled for that purpose. It floated in water and was tied by chains to the walls of the chamber. The chamber was sealed off by an iron gate from the rest of the tomb, which had rooms for the Thanes in death, with their sarcophagus's and the gold vessels and silver vessels lined around the floor in the tombs.
The End.
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