Jarj's Day - Of Machines and Magic - Prologue

Jarj’s Day

He had thrown the game stick too far and to hard, and meant to. Now Jarj was running through dense trees searching. He knew he was nearing the woods edge, trees grew further apart, became smaller, thinner. Grass lost it’s colour turning from lush green to a pale lifeless flax.

This was open ground, forbidden land. It was wrong and he would be made to pay for his transgression by the council elders, but not nearly as much as his father would make him pay if he did not find that game stick. His fathers father had carved it for his first born son, handed down through two more sons before being passed to his father, then Jarje’s brothers had used it, Now as he ran through the last few trees he could still remember the way his hands had shook, palms sweating on that day, when he was finally presented with the stick. Before the assembled family he had grasped it with all his strength to raise it above his head in triumph, and now he had lost it.
Well not Jarj, Diljem Kem had thrown the stick as hard and as far as he could in order to separate Jarj from the group and from Serria.

The game he and his friends had been playing seemed it have petered out. No one pursued him here. An ancient tradition among his people the game involved a group of players all of whom carried their own game stick. Mostly were family heirlooms passed from father to son. Carved, painted and decorated they stood from three to four feet in height, two to three inches in diameter and made of local red oak. Hard to work, very difficult to break they tended to last for generations and were all more precious for that. Playing the game was relatively simple One, two or three players were chosen depending on the overall number of players, but no more. Their sticks were taken from them by a single player, today it had been Diljem . He walked in to the woods and threw the sticks in approximately the same location. Walking back to were the group waited he would indicate the general direction in which the sticks lay. The de-sticked players or runners were given a count of ten before being pursued by their fellow players. The trick was to locate your staff in time to defend yourselves. If you didn’t manage to find it you were free to defend yourself as best you could. Brocken bones were discouraged, this was only a game after all, but often they, could not be helped. As they grew older and moved away from childish games, sticks gave way to staffs, staffs to spears. Sometimes an ancient version of both, were staffs were inlaid with a slender blade along most of it’s length.

Jarje’s father carried such a weapon, as leader of his enclaves defence and hunting party he was known as the best of his generation with the bladed staff. Jarj was going to be that good one day, it would take years of practice and many more rounds of pursuit, but he was confident he could be at least as good as his father one day.

He slowed his pace to a walk and looked around him, then stopped completely. Now he could feel his scalp burning under intense sun. Shielding his eyes against the glare he turned to see his footsteps etched out in the white sand. Jarje’s throat felt dry and tight his heart beat faster in his chest struggling for air as the panic grew. He raised his eyes re-tracing his footsteps back to the line of tree’s. His peoples land began and ended at that line and he was not supposed to be here. This was someone else’s land. It was the way with his people that you defended your land against transgressors always and without hesitation. Each enclave organised its own defence, each had its own methods, its own weapons and disciplines . When great danger threatened all the enclaves would join together to form a great army. Each would split to form new groups, each possessing fighters from each discipline. The whole army would move as one, with a single purpose. None so far had defeated them. They did not use this strength to go out and conquer or rule. What they had, they defended. The lands and concerns of others were of no importance to them. In this way the land would lend it’s strength to them. To leave your land to fight was to leave your strength behind you as you go. These were his peoples beliefs and always had been.

Jarj looked down at his feet, he no longer stood on the land of his fathers, the land he stood on belonged to someone else. Someone who may have the same beliefs as his own peoples. Fear began to churn his stomach, turn it over and over, even under the blistering sun he shivered. Quickly he began to retrace his steps. Already rehearsing how the conversation would go when he explained what had happened to his father, how he had been forced to leave the stick behind. He was playing out the conversation for the third time, the previous two hadn’t gone to well when he saw it, half buried in the sand four feet from the path he had walked. Relief washed over him as he detoured through the soft sand to the stick. Bending he gratefully picked up his prize and gently brushed of the sand.

He didn’t hear the blow coming, he felt it. His reaction was instinctive, imprinted through generation’s of training. He tucked into a ball and rolled to his right as the strange heavy bladed weapon whistled in the air were moments before his head had been. Jarje found his footing instantly and spun back to face the direction of blow. His attacker was large, much larger than he, in that instance the wisdom of his father rang in his ears ‘If your opponent is larger than you, don’t fight at his level. Bring him down to your’s. So judging the distance in an instant he sprang forward in a low dive past his enemy, he used his momentum to lend force to his blow and struck out at his attackers knee. Pride swelled in his chest as he felt the knee shatter under his blow. His people had a saying that when in battle your staff will speak to you if your strike is true, and it had. Their was no sound of pain from the stranger, no faltering or even a pause of recognition that his knee was shattered. This fact exploded through Jarje’s whole body as he moved to block the oncoming attack. The pride was gone now. Jarje fended of the second blow though only barely. A sound had invaded his being excluding everything else, his fathers staff had cracked. On his knees in the soft sand he held the staff before him, his whole essence lay in what this piece of wood meant to his father and to him. His strength bled from him for a moment only to come flooding back arm in arm with an anger he had never felt before. He saw his enemies third attack and moved to counter it, he didn’t see the fourth and final blow.

A gloved hand picked up the two halves of the stick and examined them. ‘Wood, just Wood, this should be easy’. And so the time of testing had begun.