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As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and the caravan took that to heart. It was made up of many families from many backgrounds, some who had joined only a short time ago and some who were third generation and bringing in a fourth. All the adults were called Aunts and Uncles, and all the children were nieces and nephews, and every day they strove to be a supportive family to each other, providing support in what was a difficult world. Sometimes, children grew up and left the caravan, settling down in one town or another and being warmly visited when the caravan came around again, but that was not the case for the Buynar family. This family, easily recognisable due to the bugbear blood that made all of them strong and tall, were one of the oldest families in the caravan, with Uncle Tussok being born into the family just as his father was before him.
The Buynar family had seven children with an eighth on the way, and all were the pride of their parents. Tomal was the third of these and even when he was barely five years old, he was already being taught the family trade of woodcarving. With the strength passed down from their bugbear ancestor, the Buynar family felled the trees that provided wood for the caravan’s fires, repairs for their wagons, and material for their own carving, from which came chairs and racks and bowls and spoons and intricate display pieces.
Of course, children who had so much energy more frequently used it for play than work, though all seven children had beautiful personalities. Two things quickly became fact within the caravan; One, if the children were having fun and causing chaos, the Buynar kids were involved. Two, wherever Tomal was, there Maria was also.
The two became fast friends early on during their childhood, never straying far from each other, their bond closer than that of other children. Tomal wasn’t as smart as Maria, nor was Maria as bold as Tomal, but they learned and grew from each other in the best way. Every major event in their childhoods involved the other, and secrets were passed between them as freely as the snacks and puzzles they passed each other. All up until the day the caravan was attacked.
“Ay… I’m sorry lass,” the course voice of the village folk murmured.
Little Maria blinked back tears from her eyes, not knowing whether they were from the thick woodsmoke and metallic bite and charred meat scents in the air, or from the sudden spear of loss that had shot through her heart.
“Ho, look, that’s a Nightfall mage body over there!”
“Makes sense I suppose, if they were travelling between Viirathu and Yngitiir.”
“It ain’t a pretty sight lass. I could describe it for you, but-“
“No thank you,” Maria whispered, holding tightly to her staff and pressing her hand into the warmth of the horse below her.
The man she was riding in front of pat her shoulder consolingly. “I don’t think there’s much left for you here, lass. I’m not seeing anyone who survived.”
Maria knew in her heart there would be no one to find.
“Do you have other family, kid? Aunts or cousins or something? Family friend?”
“No,” Maria whispered. “My caravan is everything I have…”
The hand on her shoulder patted some more. “There’s a family back at the village who would be willing to put you up for a bit. You can stay there for a while if you’d like.”
The girl nodded her head slowly, tears slipping over her eyes. She felt the horse beneath her shift as they turned and metal straps rang as they rode back to the village and away from the burnt, burning, and destroyed caravan.
Fast-forward hours. Night had fallen and most of the fires had burnt themselves out. One wagon was only partially singed, fallen over on its side and half of it shattered apart. It was motionless but as the night grew darker, a figure crawled out from underneath it, struggling in the dim light. He was young in face but his body was already muscling up, arms and chest strong and able to shove off the heavy wood on top of him. His hand held his head, a large welt thumping through his skull, and the sob that broke from him was only partially from physical pain as he looked over the abandoned wreck that had been his home and his family, the sob coming again as he saw familiar limp shapes in the dying light.
He knew there was a village to the east but for all he knew, they had been the ones who called the attack so he fled south, as far as his tired and aching feet could take him. The light of the moon waned into sunlight and still he ran, the endurance gifted to him by his distant bugbear ancestors holding him steady as the day wore back into sunset. The evening found him stumbling, running on his last dregs of energy, momentum and gravity moving him more than his own body did.
There was no way for him to stop himself as he stepped into open air and fell and landed heavily on something hard. He was vaguely aware of pain shooting up from his leg and of a dull, far-away scream that he thought may have come from himself. Consciousness was fading, and his last moments were hearing a gruff, faint voice saying “Ho, where did you fall from, lad?” before blessed sleep claimed him.
When Tomal woke – and what a surprise, that he woke! – he was in a warm bed with sheets tucked around him and pillows nestling his legs and a thumping headache that was luckily his only complaint. He was in a bedroom he didn’t recognise, with yellow curtains and bright sunflowers in a vase, and he heard a faint and unfamiliar clinking of metal from somewhere both close and distant.
Inaction was never Tomal’s style so he was getting up before he should have, eyeing the cast wrapped around his leg before he swung himself out of the bed and slowly stood. Blood thudded thick and fast through his broken leg, bringing a pain that made tears spring to his eyes but when it faded, he saw a plain wooden crutch nearby and used it to clumsily hop himself out of the bedroom.
He quickly discovered that he was in the small house that joined onto the back of a blacksmith, where the blacksmith himself was working a redhot piece of iron, banging a large hammer down onto it. For a few minutes, Tomal could do nothing but watch, seeing the figure silhouetted by bright flames while a strong arm swung and sparks flew. Little did he know that he was being watched in turn by the blacksmith who saw a scruffy boy who was tall for his age staring with wide eyes and an open mouth.
The blacksmith deemed his work completed and dropped the iron into a bucket, turning away from the thick steam that hissed up to face the boy. “How’s your leg, lad?” the blacksmith asked.
Tomal started, not at the gruffness of the voice (for his own father’s voice was quite gruff itself) but rather at the suddenness of being addressed and stammered in his reply. “It-It’s okay. Sir.”
A non-committal hum came from the blacksmith. “Don’t put any weight on it, lad. I didn’t pay the local doctor a pretty penny for nothing, you know.”
“Yes sir,” Tomal agreed, quickly shifting more of his weight into the crutch regardless of how it dug into his underarm. “Um… Thank-Thank you for… saving me, sir.”
“Least I could do, when you fell into my mine like that,” the blacksmith shrugged, walking over and hanging up his thick leather apron on a hook. “What were you doing running around so late in the day? You should have been at home having dinner with your parents.”
The memory of why he was there crashed on Tomal suddenly and he had to sniff and blink to hold back the sudden onslaught of tears. “I… My- My caravan… My-My family were all attacked,” he explained, staring into the fire and pretending his voice was steady. “They… I-I was… I ran, once I was sure that the mages were gone, I… I was the only one who… Everyone else was… My Pa, he-…”
Any more words dissolved into hiccups and garbled sounds stripped of any meaning as tears ran thick and fast down his cheeks. The blacksmith looked down upon this boy and though he had never had family of his own, he felt a warm ache for the child. “Here, lad,” he said as gently as his rough voice could. “How about we get some food into you and then you can get some more sleep.”
It took Tomal a few days to recover enough to move around for longer periods of time, aided by his crutch but no longer sporting a thumping headache. He learnt he was in Fehleviln, which he knew nothing of other than that it was south of where his caravan had met its fate and it sat beside two rivers. The blacksmith who had taken him in ran his shop in the armoury and weapons quarter of Fehleviln and spent many hours working on orders at the forge. Though Tomal was free to do what he wanted, he often found himself at that forge too, and one day asked if he could try pulling the great bellows that stoked the flames.
“You’re strong, lad,” the blacksmith complimented, seeing how Tomal could work the heavy cloth and wood contraption even with one leg injured.
“Yes sir,” Tomal replied, grunting with the effort. “My family felled trees for the caravan, we have to be strong.”
The blacksmith hummed (a sound he was very fond of). “Are you good at working with your hands, lad?”
“Yes sir,” Tomal replied again. “I’ve been taught for years how to fashion wood and carve and nail and glue. We make all our wares by hand.”
“Have you ever worked with metal?”
The young boy tilted his head. “No sir. Do you think I could learn?”
Now the blacksmith had never taken on an apprentice before, but he himself had been taught by a master and he was getting on in years and would soon be too old to confidently work in the forge. He knew that this young lad needed something to do, a project and a job that would give him confidence and build up that lost sense of self he felt from his lost family, lest he fall in the worst way.
So the blacksmith replied “Of course you can learn. If you’re used to working with wood then you’ve developed an eye for detail and patience for the craft. But the techniques would be quite different lad. For one, you can’t touch metal.”
“I can learn, sir!” Tomal replied. “Will you teach me?”
“Well you’ve got to earn your keep around here, I can’t support you for free. And it’d be good to have another set of hands at the forge. Once your leg is healed, I’ll start teaching you. Until then, you can work the bellows.”
Tomal’s leg did heal and as promised, the blacksmith began teaching him. Metal work was not like woodwork in any way but Tomal learned quickly with all the passion and determination his father had instilled in him, and soon was flourishing as a blacksmith’s apprentice. As the years went by, the blacksmith passed on his business to Tomal, and under Tomal’s hand it quickly grew to multiple forges and multiple blacksmiths, and became well-known in Fehleviln and even beyond for the quality and skill of the metalwork, all under the guidance of the blacksmith Tomal.
And Tomal settled down; the nomad nature of his heart had died the night that his family did, and he had no desire to venture out into the world and travel. He’d seen enough, he’d experienced enough, and he was happy to stay with his forge and his business. Even if the stars were dimmer in Fehleviln, and he couldn’t find all the constellations he had named as a child during late nights lying beside Maria, they shined none the less. He had extended the home next to the forge, he’d found a wife and they were expecting a child soon, and that was adventure enough for him.
And he never forgot the hollered calls of the Nightfalls as they descended upon his caravan and wiped them out unprovoked, and while Tomal was far too kind in nature to hold a grudge… Well, he wasn’t at all upset if a Daybreak hold was in close proximity to Fehleviln, or that some of the weapons that passed through his hands were Daybreak-owned. The war happened elsewhere in the world after all, not in Fehleviln.
He didn’t forget his family though; his six siblings, his mother and father, all his uncles and aunts and the other children, nor of the blind girl he’d called his best friend (and had perhaps jokingly proclaimed once or twice to her that he’d marry her once day). Even if he’d well and truly set down his roots, he still had the memories, and he was already preparing all the stories he’d tell to his future child.
He just wished his child could have met them.