0-100 A.E. (RECKONED FROM THE RAISING OF THE FIVE STONES)
The ancient Promethean Empire, which had once threatened to breach the circle-sea and stretch her borders to the farthest horizons of the world through the power of her ingenuity, military might, and endless legions of slaves, had rotted from within. Not only the deadly Plague that left Promethean cities empty ruins, but the petty, impotent power struggles that tore the dying husk of the Empire apart. Nowhere was this more visible than in the north-west of the continent, where the great forests had long hid pockets of resistance to Promethean forces. As the legions retreated, they began to fight each other as much as the rebellious human tribes, resulting in an orgy of destruction. Centuries of Promethean advances in technology, culture and architecture were lost, leaving few, if any, true cities to be found in the region. It is in this climate of fear and upheaval that the Dyarvik first awoke, shaking off their chains to find themselves strong.
It is unclear when the Dyarvik were first mentioned in the historical record. Stone-trolls can travel far in their long lives, and as the Prometheans expanded, they encountered mysterious giant stone circles and small groups of primitive Dyarvik. Promethean nobility feared the size and strength of the trolls, and hunted them for sport and glory in the wilds of their Empire. But their use as labourers could not be ignored, and thousands of Dyarvik wasted away in slavery, confined in claustrophobic quarters and denied hibernation. Prometheans could not fathom the meaning of the massive stone circles they encountered, nor the strange scratches upon them – they saw the Dyarvik only as dumb beasts of burden, and bred them as such. When the plague first appeared, a majority of Dyarvik were Promethean slaves, and those who remained free were constantly hunted. Troll-spawn, a natural part of the Dyarvik life-cycle and ecosystem, were killed on sight.
[Biologist's side-bar: based on observations, it has been ascertained that far from being incidental, troll-spawn play an essential role in the troll reproductive process. Trolls do not have defined genders, and must condition themselves during their lives to develop the correct reproductive organs. These same organs will degenerate over time if unused, and will even instinctively be used for sustenance during hibernation. To speed up this process, surrogate children of other species are used to keep these organs in use. The genetic material injected into these spawn during hibernation has a small chance to fertilize other trolls who might shelter the spawn again; because spawn often resemble troll children, this was not unusual throughout millennia of years of evolution.]
The Dyarvik had been conquered, but not subdued. Blessed with the endless, meditative patience of natural hunters, they watched, and they waited. They learned from their captors, the logic of construction and agriculture, the violence of war. In low rumbles and quiet murmurs they dreamed of freedom, of open fields and wide woods, and of salvation. According to Dyarvik legend this is when they first developed the ritual of the death-recitation, where dying Dyarvik would recount their lives, wisdom and greatest secrets to a young Dyarvik tasked with remembering and carrying that knowledge forward. In this way, the Dyarvik gained a substantial practical mastery of Promethean architectural technology and of a primitive agriculture.
As the collapse of the Promethean authority continued, desperate commanders began pressing Dyarvik into military service. Trolls were used to flush out human rebels from the bushes and smash the lines of rival commanders. But they had never been used in strength until the Battle of Bar-Garam (Broken Stone) in 10 A.E. Desperate to gain an advantage, a Promethean commander fielded a hundred trolls from his labour camps. He hoped the biggest of them would scare the enemy into retreating. This troll, named He-who-gazes-at-stars, was easily 25 feet tall, and had been a slave for ten years. Before his capture, he had been a clan chief; but his clan had all been slaughtered in arenas for sport long ago. Without the long hibernation needed for trolls of his size and only limited rations, he was wasting away, but still of terrible strength and clear mind. Upon facing the enemy, Star-gazer saw dozens of trolls in the enemy ranks. At this moment, as he looked up at the morning sky, dozens of bright lights began streaking across it. Star-gazer recognized the symbol of salvation when he saw it, and with a great roar, broke his chains upon his unsuspecting captors. All throughout both armies, trolls turned upon the Prometheans as one wave of rage. Thousands perished in one of the greatest routs of Promethea's history, alongside eighty-four trolls. Star-gazer himself was mortally wounded.
As he lay dying, Star-gazer began to bellow his death-recitation to the sky itself. In it he told the remaining trolls of a green valley high in the mountains, and instructed them to there assemble and guard a great cairn to the five Ancients who had built the world, to watch the stars with endless care for guidance, to guard knowledge and wisdom zealously, and to never accept slavery again, whether it be of Dyarviks or any race. These four precepts would become the rallying cry of revolution, and marked the beginning of “reckoned time” for the Dyarvik. Over the next ten years, freed trolls from across the crumbling Promethean Empire followed the call to seek the fabled valley. Not naturally inclined to violence, the trolls fled the Prometheans as much as they fought them. Nonetheless, as the rumours of the victory at Bar-Garam spread, stone-trolls became symbols of resistance, and refugees of many races began to the hulking creatures for protection.
As more and more trolls arrived, they were able to build a truly gigantic henge of five towering stones in the center of the valley, which became in immediate site of pilgrimage. The valley itself remained a holy site, but trolls and other refugees began to settle nearby immediately. Most trolls remained generally semi-nomadic and independent, moving with the seasons and establishing networks of small caves, hidden strong-places, hibernation chambers and food stockpiles.
By 40 A.E. the Prometheans had been decisively defeated, but struggles between trolls over limited resources and the density of their population surrounding the holy valley of Five Stones presented a new problem. Disputes were in particular between the Stargazer clan, which considered itself the rightful successors to Grandfather Star-gazer, and the Strongback and Deepsleeper clans, who prided themselves on never having been enslaved by the Prometheans. To solve this, a great assembly of Dyarvik chieftains and ancient elders selected five high chieftains from among themselves to guide the Dyarvik faith, mission and tribes. One (or more, as needed) of these chieftains would be replaced every two years by the decision of the assembly, at the great festival of the summer equinox.
With this election began the period of the “Twenty Wise Chieftains”, from 42 A.E. to 82 A.E. The numerical advantage of former slaves and refugees in the assembly meant that the Strongbacks, Deepsleepers, and their allies never held a majority. These High Chieftains oversaw the codification of Dyarvik ritual and practice, the resolution of tribal territory disputes, and the development of important institutions. These included encouraging the practice of the death-recitation and creating an additional Assembly of Reflection. This assembly, made up of the most ancient Dyarvik, who were near death, or woke from their decades-long sleep-meditation only rarely, was tasked with meditating on the accumulated knowledge of the Dyarvik people and offering theological or practical advice to the bi-annual general assembly, which became known as the Assembly of Voices.
In 60 A.E. the Assemblies of Reflection and Voices jointly decided that Star-gazer's commands were inspired by the Five Ancients, and should be followed as such. Mindful of the command to watch the skies, an additional Circle of Stars was established to keep track of the changes in the skies. This circle of astronomers would share information among themselves and were tasked with the rebuilding of the ancient stone circles, aligning them with the movement of the firmament. With this movement, by the end of the century, came several small “schools” of Dyarvik Circle-astronomers who traveled together with apprentices and collectively remembered the positions of stars in the skies by telling each other long mnemonic sagas about Dyarvik moving from place to place. Early investigations of geometry, arithmetic, logic and epistemology were soon to follow, but the Dyarvik as a whole retained a deeply mythological and mystical world view.
In 82 A.E., after a series of sudden, mysterious, deaths, the Assembly of Voices came suddenly under the control of a group of young High Chieftains of Deepsleeper clan. Powerful and brash, they objected to anything Promethean and derided other Dyarvik for repeating their “lies.” But for their leader, given a decade, these “born-frees” or Barumbesukeh would have been easily replaced. The young High Chieftain Speaks-like-thunder was unusually shrewd and a gifted orator. He noted that most clans and refugee communities in the valleys supported themselves by pasturing large herds of animals and nascent agriculture gleaned from the Prometheans. By contrast, the minority Barumbesukeh clans still maintained a much more nomadic lifestyle.
By 84 A.E., Speaks-like-thunder had convinced the Assembly of Reflection and the High Chieftains that animal husbandry and the cultivation of plants was “slavery”, and was not permitted either by the ancient traditions of the Dyarvik or the new commandments laid down by Stargazer. As such, no intensive agriculture could take place within a ten-day's walk of the Valley of Five stones. Thousands of trolls and their troll-spawn, and thousands more humans refugees, were thus forced to migrate down from the mountains into the foothills to pursue their livelihood. Over the next two decades, most clans traveled even further away, and while their chieftains would still return every two years for the Assembly of Voices, the Barumbesukeh gradually came to practically control over both Reflection and Voices. Resistance to them was quickly and efficiently put down, and Speaks-like-thunder, now 70 years old, was the unquestioned leader of the High Chieftains.
His tribal power did not extend, however, beyond a five days march from the holy valley, and despite the disputes over husbandry and agriculture, the Dyarvik began to instruct the local humans in metallurgy, agriculture, and herbal lore, and assemble huge herds of elk, and cattle. The patient, watchful stone-trolls were the perfect shepherds, and the smaller, attendant bands of sentient troll-spawn and troll-beasts would pass the winter hibernating with the stone-trolls and watching the herds in turn, a symbiosis that only grew stronger as the years passed and the century of the Five Stones came to and end.
Major Events for the Dyarvik:
Cultural:
- bi-annual religious festival of the Great Assembly established
- The Valley of Five Stones built and becomes the ritual and cultural center of Dyarvik religion
- Stargazer's commandments become religious doctrine:
1.The Five Stones, representing the five divine ancients, are sacred and inviolate
2.All Dyarvik have a responsibility to observe the movements and patterns of the sky
3.To constantly seek and preserve all knowledge, wisdom, and memory
4.Never accept slavery of any beast or sentient creature
- Creation of the Circle of Stars, traveling schools of astronomers
- Re-construction of hundreds of astronomical cairns and henges
Technological:
- Development and advances in semi-nomadic animal husbandry and agriculture
- Preservation of Promethean architectural, construction and metallurgical technology
- Important astronomical, mathematical and philosophical movements established, though these remain mostly oral cultures
Military:
- No real military advancements
Government:
- Assemblies of Voices and Reflection founded
- High Chieftain Speaks-like-thunder and the Barumbesukeh [stone-troll clans never enslaved by Prometheans, and who resent the refugees] take control of the High Council in 82 A.E. after forty years of refugee dominance in the Era of the “Twenty Wise Chieftains”
- Refugee-descended clans eventually forced to migrate from the central valleys to the foothills due to the prohibition of agriculture and animal husbandry
Territory Expansion:
Red denotes regions of high stone-troll and troll-spawn population; communities migrate between several locations within this region. At this point, around 15,000 Dyarvik and some 20-30,000 troll-spawn are at least nominally united in the tribal confederacy of Five Stones. Some five thousand humans also live bordering these regions.
The ancient Promethean Empire, which had once threatened to breach the circle-sea and stretch her borders to the farthest horizons of the world through the power of her ingenuity, military might, and endless legions of slaves, had rotted from within. Not only the deadly Plague that left Promethean cities empty ruins, but the petty, impotent power struggles that tore the dying husk of the Empire apart. Nowhere was this more visible than in the north-west of the continent, where the great forests had long hid pockets of resistance to Promethean forces. As the legions retreated, they began to fight each other as much as the rebellious human tribes, resulting in an orgy of destruction. Centuries of Promethean advances in technology, culture and architecture were lost, leaving few, if any, true cities to be found in the region. It is in this climate of fear and upheaval that the Dyarvik first awoke, shaking off their chains to find themselves strong.
It is unclear when the Dyarvik were first mentioned in the historical record. Stone-trolls can travel far in their long lives, and as the Prometheans expanded, they encountered mysterious giant stone circles and small groups of primitive Dyarvik. Promethean nobility feared the size and strength of the trolls, and hunted them for sport and glory in the wilds of their Empire. But their use as labourers could not be ignored, and thousands of Dyarvik wasted away in slavery, confined in claustrophobic quarters and denied hibernation. Prometheans could not fathom the meaning of the massive stone circles they encountered, nor the strange scratches upon them – they saw the Dyarvik only as dumb beasts of burden, and bred them as such. When the plague first appeared, a majority of Dyarvik were Promethean slaves, and those who remained free were constantly hunted. Troll-spawn, a natural part of the Dyarvik life-cycle and ecosystem, were killed on sight.
[Biologist's side-bar: based on observations, it has been ascertained that far from being incidental, troll-spawn play an essential role in the troll reproductive process. Trolls do not have defined genders, and must condition themselves during their lives to develop the correct reproductive organs. These same organs will degenerate over time if unused, and will even instinctively be used for sustenance during hibernation. To speed up this process, surrogate children of other species are used to keep these organs in use. The genetic material injected into these spawn during hibernation has a small chance to fertilize other trolls who might shelter the spawn again; because spawn often resemble troll children, this was not unusual throughout millennia of years of evolution.]
The Dyarvik had been conquered, but not subdued. Blessed with the endless, meditative patience of natural hunters, they watched, and they waited. They learned from their captors, the logic of construction and agriculture, the violence of war. In low rumbles and quiet murmurs they dreamed of freedom, of open fields and wide woods, and of salvation. According to Dyarvik legend this is when they first developed the ritual of the death-recitation, where dying Dyarvik would recount their lives, wisdom and greatest secrets to a young Dyarvik tasked with remembering and carrying that knowledge forward. In this way, the Dyarvik gained a substantial practical mastery of Promethean architectural technology and of a primitive agriculture.
As the collapse of the Promethean authority continued, desperate commanders began pressing Dyarvik into military service. Trolls were used to flush out human rebels from the bushes and smash the lines of rival commanders. But they had never been used in strength until the Battle of Bar-Garam (Broken Stone) in 10 A.E. Desperate to gain an advantage, a Promethean commander fielded a hundred trolls from his labour camps. He hoped the biggest of them would scare the enemy into retreating. This troll, named He-who-gazes-at-stars, was easily 25 feet tall, and had been a slave for ten years. Before his capture, he had been a clan chief; but his clan had all been slaughtered in arenas for sport long ago. Without the long hibernation needed for trolls of his size and only limited rations, he was wasting away, but still of terrible strength and clear mind. Upon facing the enemy, Star-gazer saw dozens of trolls in the enemy ranks. At this moment, as he looked up at the morning sky, dozens of bright lights began streaking across it. Star-gazer recognized the symbol of salvation when he saw it, and with a great roar, broke his chains upon his unsuspecting captors. All throughout both armies, trolls turned upon the Prometheans as one wave of rage. Thousands perished in one of the greatest routs of Promethea's history, alongside eighty-four trolls. Star-gazer himself was mortally wounded.
As he lay dying, Star-gazer began to bellow his death-recitation to the sky itself. In it he told the remaining trolls of a green valley high in the mountains, and instructed them to there assemble and guard a great cairn to the five Ancients who had built the world, to watch the stars with endless care for guidance, to guard knowledge and wisdom zealously, and to never accept slavery again, whether it be of Dyarviks or any race. These four precepts would become the rallying cry of revolution, and marked the beginning of “reckoned time” for the Dyarvik. Over the next ten years, freed trolls from across the crumbling Promethean Empire followed the call to seek the fabled valley. Not naturally inclined to violence, the trolls fled the Prometheans as much as they fought them. Nonetheless, as the rumours of the victory at Bar-Garam spread, stone-trolls became symbols of resistance, and refugees of many races began to the hulking creatures for protection.
As more and more trolls arrived, they were able to build a truly gigantic henge of five towering stones in the center of the valley, which became in immediate site of pilgrimage. The valley itself remained a holy site, but trolls and other refugees began to settle nearby immediately. Most trolls remained generally semi-nomadic and independent, moving with the seasons and establishing networks of small caves, hidden strong-places, hibernation chambers and food stockpiles.
By 40 A.E. the Prometheans had been decisively defeated, but struggles between trolls over limited resources and the density of their population surrounding the holy valley of Five Stones presented a new problem. Disputes were in particular between the Stargazer clan, which considered itself the rightful successors to Grandfather Star-gazer, and the Strongback and Deepsleeper clans, who prided themselves on never having been enslaved by the Prometheans. To solve this, a great assembly of Dyarvik chieftains and ancient elders selected five high chieftains from among themselves to guide the Dyarvik faith, mission and tribes. One (or more, as needed) of these chieftains would be replaced every two years by the decision of the assembly, at the great festival of the summer equinox.
With this election began the period of the “Twenty Wise Chieftains”, from 42 A.E. to 82 A.E. The numerical advantage of former slaves and refugees in the assembly meant that the Strongbacks, Deepsleepers, and their allies never held a majority. These High Chieftains oversaw the codification of Dyarvik ritual and practice, the resolution of tribal territory disputes, and the development of important institutions. These included encouraging the practice of the death-recitation and creating an additional Assembly of Reflection. This assembly, made up of the most ancient Dyarvik, who were near death, or woke from their decades-long sleep-meditation only rarely, was tasked with meditating on the accumulated knowledge of the Dyarvik people and offering theological or practical advice to the bi-annual general assembly, which became known as the Assembly of Voices.
In 60 A.E. the Assemblies of Reflection and Voices jointly decided that Star-gazer's commands were inspired by the Five Ancients, and should be followed as such. Mindful of the command to watch the skies, an additional Circle of Stars was established to keep track of the changes in the skies. This circle of astronomers would share information among themselves and were tasked with the rebuilding of the ancient stone circles, aligning them with the movement of the firmament. With this movement, by the end of the century, came several small “schools” of Dyarvik Circle-astronomers who traveled together with apprentices and collectively remembered the positions of stars in the skies by telling each other long mnemonic sagas about Dyarvik moving from place to place. Early investigations of geometry, arithmetic, logic and epistemology were soon to follow, but the Dyarvik as a whole retained a deeply mythological and mystical world view.
In 82 A.E., after a series of sudden, mysterious, deaths, the Assembly of Voices came suddenly under the control of a group of young High Chieftains of Deepsleeper clan. Powerful and brash, they objected to anything Promethean and derided other Dyarvik for repeating their “lies.” But for their leader, given a decade, these “born-frees” or Barumbesukeh would have been easily replaced. The young High Chieftain Speaks-like-thunder was unusually shrewd and a gifted orator. He noted that most clans and refugee communities in the valleys supported themselves by pasturing large herds of animals and nascent agriculture gleaned from the Prometheans. By contrast, the minority Barumbesukeh clans still maintained a much more nomadic lifestyle.
By 84 A.E., Speaks-like-thunder had convinced the Assembly of Reflection and the High Chieftains that animal husbandry and the cultivation of plants was “slavery”, and was not permitted either by the ancient traditions of the Dyarvik or the new commandments laid down by Stargazer. As such, no intensive agriculture could take place within a ten-day's walk of the Valley of Five stones. Thousands of trolls and their troll-spawn, and thousands more humans refugees, were thus forced to migrate down from the mountains into the foothills to pursue their livelihood. Over the next two decades, most clans traveled even further away, and while their chieftains would still return every two years for the Assembly of Voices, the Barumbesukeh gradually came to practically control over both Reflection and Voices. Resistance to them was quickly and efficiently put down, and Speaks-like-thunder, now 70 years old, was the unquestioned leader of the High Chieftains.
His tribal power did not extend, however, beyond a five days march from the holy valley, and despite the disputes over husbandry and agriculture, the Dyarvik began to instruct the local humans in metallurgy, agriculture, and herbal lore, and assemble huge herds of elk, and cattle. The patient, watchful stone-trolls were the perfect shepherds, and the smaller, attendant bands of sentient troll-spawn and troll-beasts would pass the winter hibernating with the stone-trolls and watching the herds in turn, a symbiosis that only grew stronger as the years passed and the century of the Five Stones came to and end.
Major Events for the Dyarvik:
Cultural:
- bi-annual religious festival of the Great Assembly established
- The Valley of Five Stones built and becomes the ritual and cultural center of Dyarvik religion
- Stargazer's commandments become religious doctrine:
1.The Five Stones, representing the five divine ancients, are sacred and inviolate
2.All Dyarvik have a responsibility to observe the movements and patterns of the sky
3.To constantly seek and preserve all knowledge, wisdom, and memory
4.Never accept slavery of any beast or sentient creature
- Creation of the Circle of Stars, traveling schools of astronomers
- Re-construction of hundreds of astronomical cairns and henges
Technological:
- Development and advances in semi-nomadic animal husbandry and agriculture
- Preservation of Promethean architectural, construction and metallurgical technology
- Important astronomical, mathematical and philosophical movements established, though these remain mostly oral cultures
Military:
- No real military advancements
Government:
- Assemblies of Voices and Reflection founded
- High Chieftain Speaks-like-thunder and the Barumbesukeh [stone-troll clans never enslaved by Prometheans, and who resent the refugees] take control of the High Council in 82 A.E. after forty years of refugee dominance in the Era of the “Twenty Wise Chieftains”
- Refugee-descended clans eventually forced to migrate from the central valleys to the foothills due to the prohibition of agriculture and animal husbandry
Territory Expansion:
Red denotes regions of high stone-troll and troll-spawn population; communities migrate between several locations within this region. At this point, around 15,000 Dyarvik and some 20-30,000 troll-spawn are at least nominally united in the tribal confederacy of Five Stones. Some five thousand humans also live bordering these regions.