Giants

After mulling over what my father, Torvek, had said, I began to make connections to my childhood memories. Although I was very young, I do recall being in village that was almost certainly Kled. I have a vivid memory of a place that was peopled almost exclusively by dwarves. Even to this day I have never seen so many of my people in one place at one time.

I broke the long silence, "Father you were right we were in Kled. But I remember that we were not there very long, perhaps a week or even less. I would have been very unlikely that you would have arrived while we were still there. Most likely we were long gone at that point. No one could have told you where we were. When I was older my mother told me that she was approached by a dwarven preserver that was a member of the Veiled Alliance. That dwarf told us that the Veiled Alliance was willing to relocate escaped slaves, as long as they agreed to serve the alliance. We were forced to change our names and we were put on a caravan to Draj."

At my words the spirit's face fell. My father had such an expression of frustration and despair that I nearly wept myself. I thought it best to distract him so I asked, "Father please tell me what happened after Kled."

As I had hoped Torvek's spirit rallied and he continued his narrative. "I was at a loss of what to do at first but then I got caught up in the work on the Book of the Kemilok Kings. My life changed when I heard those words. I never knew. We dwarves are the guardians of the world. We are the guardians of the natural world and the soldiers of the weaker peoples. I felt a renewed purpose. It was not just coincidence that the 'green races' kept asking for my help. It is our fate. It is the fate of the dwarven people to safe guard the world from evil. And, though it took me some time to work it out, opposing the defilers would also bring me back my family. I figured that if I could stay alive long enough that word of me might spread throughout Athas and reach wherever you and your mother were hiding."

That was unexpected but it certainly fit the facts as I came to know them growing up. We did in fact have word of the exploits of Torvek the gladiator. I did not have the heart to tell my father that much of what we heard was contradictory and confusing. In fact many tales had been twisted, probably by the templars, to make my father seem to be a bloody handed murderer. His whereabouts were ambiguous because reports would come from distant lands claiming that he was in two different cities at the same time.

My father continued, "From then on I decided that I would help anyone that asked and that I would resist the evil of defiling magic wherever I found it. For sometime I had been having strange dreams and hearing distant voices when I was tired or sleeping. Normally I would put such down to evil magic or even the start of insanity. But after the Book of the Kemilok Kings I decided to follow the voices and do what they asked as long as it seemed good and not evil. The voice was telling us to go to Balic. I had my doubts but we went ahead anyway. On the journey to Balic we heard that there was a kestrekel headed beast head giant causing trouble maybe even doing some 'subvertin'.

We went after the giant and, as deadly as it was, we brought it down by numbers before it could be a threat. A few days later we were ambushed by a brough.

The four armed giant was dangerous because it could throw so many boulders so quickly. But when we closed with it, we tore it to shreds despite its size.