The Birth of Brae: An Introduction to Mytyrra’s Highlands
Dry wind threatens to blow you from the hilltop. You did not climb thus far just to be thrown to your death by the whims of ghosts. The spear you purchased in Gand holds fast among the incline’s rocks, inscribed with the stave-runes common of Glen Varloch witch-crafters. Rising from the rains of early spring, the hills are greener than you’ve ever seen them. Tumbled stones of jade, marbled with the raw quartz of the continent’s roughest crust. Suddenly, something darts about on the hill opposite you.
Stone Fomorians, tall, grey, and nimble as any mountain creature, scramble about the stones. They are the descendants of great giants, evident in their raw strength and earthen features. Alongside them, a hunting dragon! With scales made of living garnet, the crystalline beast leaps deftly beside its masters. Your blood runs cold as you realize one of the Stone Fomorians has noticed you. Its pupilless eyes cut through the wandering fog of the highlands. Just as you expect bowshot, an arrow careening to kill you, the Fomorian points just above you. You turn, and the clouds part to show you their secret. You have reached the summit and found the standing stones you seek… but wicll the gods immured there aid you?
When the world was new, the elder giants roamed these hills. They could cup entire glens in their palms, though the glens did not belong to them. These lands were the property of dragons. From the black spired castles of Glen Varloch to the unyielding cities of Glen Cuaradh, the sky was shot through with winged death. When two beings hunt one another for sport, is war an appropriate word? The elder giants lived to tear the dragons from the clouds and the dragons left giant carcasses on every hill. As the hellkites of Brae threatened to rise to a state of power unrivaled on the Mytyrran continent, their blood was curdled by a certain giant’s wild cry. The stories surrounding that giant are not mythology, nor religion, but something far more powerful.
Fyngall, the Wyrm Slayer, united the giants under his spear banner. There would be no remnants of giantkind today had a stone been set otherwise on his path to conquest. For what little influence the elven empire and human kingdom have had on Brae, they have done whatever possible to stifle the raw power afforded by belief in Fyngall’s saga. They have been conclusively unsuccessful.
It is said that Fyngall was not a very large giant, but rather, struggled to keep up with his brothers and father. One of five giants born to the giantess Angara, Fyngall was raised in the south of Brae. The steel-boughs were but saplings then, and the marshes of Glasswater had yet to yield moss. In that corner of the world, there stood only giants and their natural predators. Angara was killed by an adult bog dragon in the wee hours of the moring, one that called itself Moonwise. While his brothers grieved and his father began to construct a cairn for Angara, Fyngall followed the contrails in the sky.
Finding Moonwise asleep, the boy-giant tore a fang the size of a tree out of its skull. Fyngall swiftly returned the fang to the dragon’s skull. Not in its mouth, of course, but in the depths of its arcana-riddled brain. With a twist and a pull, Fyngall tore the fang free and vowed to kill all dragon tyrants. The giants of the south would have laughed at him had he not returned draped in the hide of Moonwise. Affixing the polished husk of a young steel-bough’s trunk to the fang, the spear-wielding lord of giants was born.
Marching out of the Fogar Hem hills, Fyngall led an army of hunters north. While his exploits have been chronicled at length, allow us to return to history still in the making. Fyngall met his death in between the claws of a moon-sized elder dragon, tearing its way free of hibernation in Mytyrra’s core. Nōg, the hungry god, died before it could even break through the planet’s crust. Fyngall perished as he drove his spear deep into the earth; “to the soul of the world,” as the bards put it. As he died, the spirits of the land thanked Fyngall by turning Nōg’s lifeless claws into the most majestic mountains in the world and entombing him within.
Over the course of his life, Fyngall had sired children in every glen. Generations later, the children of Fyngall built their fires in the ruins of draconic cities. Evolution took hold as the giants moved into the roofed cities of the dragons and they began to shrink. They are now the species now referred to as Fomorians— the younger giants.
A very rough sketch of the difference between Hill and Stone Fomorians, scrapped out in a notebook while on a train from Osaka to Kyoto. You can see where I scribbled out “Hill” under the Stone Fomorian, confusing the difference as I created them.
Two ethnic groups rose from the lines of Fyngall: Stone Fomorians and Hill Fomorians.
Stone Fomorians live in the wilds, scaling cliff walls to their cave dwellings once inhabited by giant ancestors. They live by no creed and follow no leader save their strongest war chief. Stone Fomorians are tall, grey-skinned folk who raid with impunity and hunt without a care.
Hill Fomorians are the inheritors of their ancestors’ culture, civilized tribesfolk who inhabit grand villages, towns of wood and metal. Hill Fomorians are immediately recognizable for their green-grey skin and the tusks on either side of their mouth. Though primal in appearance and code, Hill Fomorians live in townships no less advanced than those of Batholith.
The ancestral fire of the Wyrm Slayer still burns bright in the giants of Brae, but hate has long since given way to practicality. Dragons had been scattered to the wilds by the killings of their kings, returning to their ways of savage plotting. The Hill Fomorians were the first to begin bonding with the dragons, besting them in combat then forging a relationship with the beasts. Hill Fomorians can be seen splitting the sky on dragon-back, wearing their signature finned helmets to act as a rudder/fin. Thus, the dragon riders of Brae are known to most as the Finmen. In many villages, these finned helmets are bestowed at adolescence and worn at all waking hours until a Fomorian has won their right to walk un-helmeted.
Each of the five glens of Brae upholds the name of Fyngall differently. To the Hill Fomorians of Glen Varloch, he was a powerful shaman self-schooled in primordial magics. To those of Glen Uisge, he was a waterman of legendary skill, sailing into the depths of sea dragon lairs. These different interpretations of Fyngall are to be explored in depths at a later date, along with the religion of Brae and the country’s place in Mytyrran geopolitics. Whoever he was, Fyngall’s quest of revenge laid the foundation for a nation of giants who’d come to wield raw power unrivaled anywhere in Mytyrra.
Until these issues are explored further here, know that Brae is no less full of giants than it was at the time of the world’s youth. Its dramatic landscape is full of gigantic fauna, Fomorian hunters, and the raw majesty of living earth. Many of the Hill Fomorian tribes are acutely friendly to travelers, making Brae a first rate destination for wanderers. Despite the contentedness of dragonkind to live in the shadow of the giant-spawn, many wonder if the seed of evolutionary rebellion stirs in the dragons as it once did in giants. This and many other aspects of life in Brae and Mytyrra as a whole are to be discussed here, so stick around!
