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.
