The Travels of Ser Cog Legonarzes
I. Of the arrival of Ser Cog Legonarzes in
In the late autumn of 778, the yearly caravan arrived at the Hall of Axes, Mountainhome of the Golden Council, home to the Throne of the Bald King. The caravan bore many bars of platinum, for the Golden Council was at that time engaged in the construction of a platinum Mead Hall1 in one of the many subterannean caverns beneath the Hall of Axes.
In addition, the caravan bore a pair of mated Snakemen, which were purchased by the broker on behalf of Urist the Thinker, the Philosopher appointed to the king, who had creatures of all sorts caged in her chambers that she might converse with them upon varied topics and, by the application of widely disparate viewpoints, come closer to ultimate truth.
The caravan was run by the usual cast of merchants, and accompanied by a cast of guards. The guards were all unusually tan for dwarves, as a result of spending time out in the sun while travelling as opposed to properly residing underground. In this, though, they were not far removed from woodcutters or huntsmen in many fledgling settlements. One Hammerdwarf, however, stood out as more deeply tanned than the rest, his hair bleached near white by the sun and his face and arms crisscrossed by numerous scars. Furthermore, he spoke the Dwarven tongue with an unusual accent.
Intrigued, Urist the Thinker asked him his name and what part of the world he hailed from. He demurred as to the place of his birth, answering that he was Ser Cog Legonarzes, sometime previously a knight in the employ of the Merchant Princes of Oshokmong, but for many years a traveler going from one place to another on the face of the world.
Delighted by the opportunity to speak to one who had traveled extensively and seen much of the world, Urist invited the hammerdwarf to dwell in the Hall of Axes for some time as her guest, and to see all that it had to offer, and then to speak of how it compared with the other parts of the world with which he was familiar. Legonarzes, who was not opposed to the idea of resting for some time before resuming his travels, thanked her effusively and elegantly.
This being settled, the Philosopher ordered a guide to be procured for Legonarzes, and for him to, for the time, be treated as a royal guest2.
***
Notes
1 The Platinum Mead Hall was never finished. Several years after the departure of Ser Cog Legonarzes, the Hall of Axes was attacked and sacked by a band of nomadic goblins led by a one-armed minotaur whose name is lost to history. Eventually the invaders were repulsed, but the Hall of Axes never fully recovered, and during the following winter, it was abandoned, with the Golden Council moving north and eventually settling in the current Mountainhome, Angelmount.
2 This is outside the usual perrogative of even a Royal Philosopher, but Urist the Thinker was a special case. As at this point the Bald King had withdrawn into his famous Three-Hundred Year Lament following the death of his wife, many of his social duties and powers devolved upon the nobility. Urist the Thinker, having previously earned great respect among the Dwarves of the Hall of Axes for killing a trio of goblins that ambushed her while she was contemplating the patterns of leaves fallen from an oak tree, grew particularly influential during this period.
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