Some of the dwellings in Tombolin were built into the hills themselves, burrowing underground into interconnected communities. There were taverns, homes, and other places of business in these subterranean passageways. As such, the village was larger that it might first appear. Above ground was a more pastoral farming community while the underground was a thriving marketplace, where craftsmen and peddlers sold their wares. Serus Thespid was one such craftsman, who maintained a smithy in the aptly-named Underground.
Serus was a large, heavily muscled man, his thinning mop of hair more gray than red, his wild beard streaked with soot more often than not. His features were grim and angular, as if cut from stone. As he lifted his hammer to strike the length of metal laid out on his table, it was like watching solid rock violently separate from a cliff side. His wiry frame wound taut, as if constantly prepared to spring into terrifying action. He was very serious about his work and celebrated for his skill at his craft. The sound of his hammer on steel echoed through the underground corridors endlessly.
Serus Thespid's smithy was located in a secluded corner of the Underground, far away from the hustle and bustle of the central marketplace. Those who required his services knew where to find him as his work spoke for itself. The blacksmith, reclusive as he was, required the relative solitude to perfect his craft. For many years he had been the primary smith of Tombolin and as far as he was concerned it would remain that way--until he passed his skills on to his son, as his father had done to him. It was a time-honored tradition for the Thespid line that stretched back to the days of the First Priests. Or so he was told; Serus had his doubts about how the village had been founded. Stories have a way of being distorted with the retelling.
Still the smithy was choked with the sound of the hammer striking steel. The blacksmith's current task was the silvery blade of a long sword, a recent commission. Weapons of war were a common request for Thespid, despite Tombolin's lack of conflict with outside forces. As secluded as the village was, it very rarely saw visitors of any kind, much less armies advancing to occupy its soil. Still, stories had been passed down since the time of the First Priests that recounted the exploits of the terrible creatures of Lakara. It was foretold that these beasts would one day seek to reclaim the great clearing on which Tombolin now rested.
These creatures, dubbed only as Lakarans in the local lore, had been used as a symbol for countless decades. They were the object of every fairy tale, every scary story told to children. While those stories were tales of fantasy, many villagers still believed in the existence of these Lakarans and were determined to prepare for their return. The price of not being vigilant was death, so it was said. As such, young men and women of the village were uniformly taught the ways of war, as they themselves were taught by their forebears.
Thespid put little stock in these tales. The First Priests had a lot of strange beliefs that did not seem compatible with the way the world worked in his mind. It was not commonly believed that great powerful men in the sky were responsible for dictating the fates of mere mortals on the ground (as the Priests believed) so why then should it be believed that the Lakarans were real as well? In his fifty-odd years of life he'd seen not a whit of evidence of these beasts, unless the First Priests had confused deer and wolves for mystical beings. Serus had spent a lot of time in the Lakara Wood and had traveled deeper than most. There was nothing unusual out there, and if his suspicions were correct, there was likely nothing unusual on the outside of it either.
In his younger days he'd fancied the idea of traveling beyond Lakara and investigating the lands beyond, perhaps sighting the fabled Coramni Plains the First Priests had evidently traveled through to get to what became Tombolin. Duty to his craft and family superseded his desires and he never followed through on his ambition. He was becoming an old man now and imagined that he would never see what lay beyond those woods. Wistful for a moment, he paused with his hammer in mid air, but then he grunted and continued. It mattered not. There was no use pining over the decisions he'd made in the past. It was his responsibility as a man to provide for his family.
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