Retally's Folly

"Just a few days walk from here is the ocean, the southern boundary of the known world.

We live so close, and yet we never, ever visit, even though the food left on the shore there is good.

The family once revered the ocean for its blessings. Special green food is said to have washed up from the tides every day, which nourished our bodies and let our children always grow strong. The supply was said to be regenerated with each cycle and to be inexhaustible. In those days it was even said that none wasted from hunger, for a meal could always be found waiting for those in need.

We believed, back then, that the blessings were sent by our ancestors looking down upon us, guiding us in life. Many generations ago, however, we realized there was nothing holy there. If it seems too good to be true, then you should realize that it probably is. The ocean was the home of evil things. Another world in which we did not belong - a realm of demons.

Evil creatures started to rise up from the waters and clamber up the land. They were small, not much larger than your kind, so we didn’t know to fear them at first. They say some were even kind. It was all a ruse. They made us believe they were gentle so that we let down our guard.

The demons were biters, and we became their meat. In the times of old, the family didn’t know how to fight back against its enemies. We could only run. We were good at that. But the demons were creatures with supernatural ability. They generated flames from the air and devised impossible tricks to catch us that no one had ever seen before. They set the grasslands on fire, wielding the power of a storm in their hands. The family ran from the evil, but they tripped and fell over hidden barriers and were left injured and crying for help. Some were pushed over the edges of the cliffs into the ocean itself, where the demons swarmed upon their hapless forms struggling in the water, and cut them apart.

It is said that the demons’ reign of terror lasted generations. During this dark time, the family retreated to the far north, where sustaining new life was said to be just short of impossible. Our people suffered and dwindled. It was the wide-mind Retally of the Tidelands Herd who led the movement to regain our land and fight back against the demons. Retally was young then, and had the dumb confidence of those who lack experience. He thought the family could overtake them if they worked together. Retally thought he had learned to control fire too.

But he was wrong.

His actions brought almost his whole herd down to their deaths. His fire escaped him, and soon consumed them. Yet it was too much even for the demons, as it ate up their home in its inferno, and they fled back to the sea. Retally was among the only ones who returned alive, yet he was so broken and ashamed of what he had done that he eventually wandered away into the north alone, and was never seen again.

The elders told me as a child that the demons stayed away from the land for a long time after Retally’s folly. The rest of the family were able, over time, to move back into some of their old feeding grounds - but never again to the shore of the ocean. Only in the time of my great-great grandfather did the demons start to trickle back out. Their ventures thereafter were lesser, and they stayed near the water from which they came. Unlike those in the times before, they seemed afraid of us now. They hid themselves behind barricades and ditches. None dared approach us, and in turn none of us dared to return to the ocean… until me. My curiosity got the best of me once, a number of years ago, and I made the trek to our borders. I saw the demons with my own eyes… but they didn’t scare me. They were so small, and they were interesting. They seemed almost child-like, and they were intelligent. They almost drew me in closer… and I realized for myself then how they had tricked my ancestors.

I left and vowed not to return, lest I repeat our history. They would stay in their world, and us in ours, and we would not have to meet in the middle. But the smoke is closer now than it has ever been. It can only mean that the demons are creeping closer again. What they intend cannot be good for us, and now our world has shrunk and we are already at the limits. We cannot run anymore.

Not only can we not, but we would not. I have changed our culture, and because of me, everyone’s first instinct now would be to fight back against the demons if they came for us.

And like Retally before us, that is a battle we would lose."