Legends of Belariath

Trolls

Mountain Trolls

History - The Move

The progress inland is a strange affair. The Move, as it’s popularly referred to, began before living memory and almost before written history of the Mountain Troll.

The civilized nations had rejected them for their inherent savagery in military tactics and lifestyle. Their backs had been pushed against the rocky hills they had resided beneath all their lives until they would not stand to be pushed anymore. This ordinary branch of Troll instead climbed over the natural barriers to wrongfully abandon the other races. Among the allies and enemies left behind were their fellow Trolls. After years of wandering westward and becoming creatures of the precipice, only finding solitude in natural darkness, they had earned their species name by creed – Mountain Troll.

They cut themselves off from the rest of the world and brought their crafts and skills with them. Trolls, their faculties for invention being forever cursed, cannot make new things, or typically lack the ingenuity to follow any sparks of genius into the light of discovery. They have crossed the mountain range from one side to the other and back again. Upon their return, in present day Belariath, their culture has hardly changed.

The span of time it took to traverse the thick band of inhospitable topography is unknown. The only difference in their race between the other traditional breeds of Troll has become the onyx of their eyes, the granite lined pits of their bellies, heavy quartz hearts, and enormous earthen frames built expressly for terra-forming the mountainsides they respect.

On their original leg of the journey to the far side of the mountains, the fractured communities dug out artificial canyons or underground structures similar to tiny ant hives. The lush, untapped, often secreted valleys provided building materials and food that couldn’t be reaped from stone. The race kept to itself, a scattered swath of subterranean sub-culture that stained the landscape as it swept west, emptying unexplored crevasses and cave dwellings that would last for countless centuries.

The initiation of this exodus is simple. The remainder of it is rather straightforward as well. It was an effortless hike that covered many hundreds of miles and many families and generations, until they all reached their goal. That’s where the first problems stirred.

On the other side of the mountain range that has and always will continue to go unnamed among this fraction of Troll kind, they stared at the immeasurable oceans with revere… and terror. For there was nothing…

It might have been an oasis of infinite blessing to the Elves. Surely, the parasitic Humans could wrench a new beginning and a land of endless opportunity from this place. None of that mattered. The Mountain Trolls could not bear to stare into the face of the unimaginable, bleak, and unforgiving, and they quickly turned away. The ocean meant nothing but death to them.

This fleeing from the unknown is what began The Move. Giving up was the easy part. The fact that it was influenced by primordial dread made it a simple, logical step to a people who hadn’t stopped traveling since the most ancient of their elders had been born.

They turned around, and went back the way they came.

Previous dens that pocked the stone hills were still there, preserved by their own impregnable walls, adamant against the encroachment of time. The Trolls would follow them back to the lands that had pushed them away, and that they had willingly rejected in kind. Inestimable brine was like a poison to their minds, and slowly, achingly, their numbers stopped rising, then began to fall, then started to suffer, and soon began to die.

Stagnation was what wasted them. Existence was filled with waiting and excavation and The Move, and not preserving their meager lifestyles or study. There were few equivalents to modern scribes among the traveling villages. In place of scholars with pen and parchment there were collectors of artifacts and tome, old medicine men and women who guarded their knowledge with curses and rhetoric, and elders who claimed to know far more then they ever could. Theirs were empty lives that lead to nowhere in particular, and the Mountain Trolls had no reason to complain.

A great deal of time had passed for them and there was nothing to mark its stay. No progress, nothing gained, nothing.

Now, balanced on the brink of the barren world that embraced them and abreast to the one they hate, they’ve been reintroduced to something secretly yearned for since the beginning. The first sights, smells, and tastes of new races and new things flooded into the younger generations. The first new contacts have spawned a rush of vitality and growth in the remnants of the Mountain Troll, but even those might not save it from falling into the abyss of forgotten memory. A blemish on the face of Belariath.

Roquai