Lidarion: Chapter 4

There are two types of wars. The ones you win and the ones you lose. The longer it takes you to figure out which type you’re fighting the more likely it’s the second, and we fought the machine war a long time.

You’ve never been there, but far to the south of Lidarion there is an impossibly long island chain. It is the ancestral home of the gnomes. Each island in the chain was the territory of the clan that had settled it, and each clan was in their own way industrious and experimental. The gnomes love technology, always have. And their obsession with gadgets and contraptions had led them to generations of technological advancement that turned their chain of islands into a never ending parade of mechanical marvels. Each designed to solve a specific problem, while accidentally creating three new ones, requiring more machines and gadgets to solve the new problems which created three more and so on and so on. Looking back on it, we were our own best friends and our own worst enemies. At least, until we discovered the outside world.

Gnomes have photographic memory. And they have no schools or universities. All their knowledge is passed down from master to apprentice and from one familial generation to the next. For all the technical knowledge the gnomes had amassed, nearly none of it was written down, the very nature and workings of their society were a part of their living memory.

Orcs and Humans discovered gnomes roughly around the same time. The gnomes were happy to make agreements with both races and for the first time gnomish technology left the islands. It was not long before the brilliance and ingenuity of the gnomes was turned to ruin and damnation in the hands of the orcs and humans.

With their newly acquired tools long silent borders were awoken with bloody conflict. These skirmishes grew until they exploded into a full-fledged war. Not long after war had broken out, representatives of both races returned to the gnomes to request the creation and delivery of grandiose war machines. The gnomes having seen the plans the other races brought for them, they refused to take part, and at first these denials were accepted.

The lies both sides fed to the Gnomes may have been simplistic but they need not be complicated to fool a race of people who by nature assumed everyone was telling the truth. Lies are the enemy of knowledge, so there was no use for deception in gnomish society. By the end of that first year the gnomes were building death machines piecemeal and shipping them back to their respective owners to be assembled and used on the field of battle.

It wasn’t long before both sides realized the gnomes were an advantage they could not allow their enemies to possess and so Orc’s and humans brought their war to my homeland. They burned my paradise to the ground.

Now, there are no more masters, all the apprentices are gone, very few working machines left to remember them by. We had to abandon the islands we had always known as home, islands we had never thought to count, until after there was nothing left to count.

With the factories destroyed, there were no new machines. The war simmered back down to border skirmishes, the fires of conquest were dying out. The machine war did not end with a cease fire, or proclamation of peace. The machine ended because killing with your bare hands was no longer the coolest way to die.

It was these final desperate battles before boredom set in that Trent’s life would change forever.