Intro For First Novel

The tribe has always taken from the weak to feed their own. The tribe only allows the strong to live. Such is nature, and such is the nature of man.

This is what Altabain had been taught all his life. His tribe lived amongst the forests, living as they always had, poised against the Demon-men who came years ago from the sea, and took lands along the coast the tribe claimed for itself. They were not men like Altabain and his tribe. They did not come out and fight the tribe honorably. They did not abandon their weak. Instead, the Demon-men care not for honor, and hide behind words and treaties. The Demon-men are cowards, whose laws and teachings only enslave the strong to the will of the weak. Even the lowliest of the Lesser Tribes had more honor than these fiends. When the tribe came to take the land, their enemy used strange means to shoot fire from their hands; they tried confusing the tribe, tricking them with some sort of power they did not understand, making themselves disappear and reappear, like a fox teasing and running about before being mauled by a bear. Some in the tribe even reported horrifying beasts that protected the cowardly men of the sea. For their strange power, the Tribe could only watch as the Demon-men had now begun to multiply.

For this, Altabain hated the Demon-men. They didn’t deserve to live alongside the tribe because they were weak. Altabain was strong; indeed, amongst the strongest. And it was his right, his honor, to conquer the Demon-men. His elders spoke of how he had been sent by the Gods to the tribe as a mere infant; he had no parents, no family but the tribe, the elders declared. Forever after, Altabain was hailed as the tribe’s strongest warrior, and he had been trained more intensively than any other. At only seventeen, Altabain showed immense strength; he had grown huge, larger than any in the tribe. Surely, it was a blessing from the Gods. His miraculous strength and size was a living symbol of the tribe; of its superiority, and its eventual victory over the Demon-men.