PC Prologue - Nolan Galloway

Different.  Nolan Galloway was born different.  In the community of Little Hat, a community that makes the best of every day and stay quiet and small, being born different can be a problem.  Marietta and Roman Galloway cautiously celebrated the discovery of their pregnancy.  The small farm and smithy could always use an extra hand and an heir.  Marietta told her husband over tea, twisting a dishrag in her hand.  Roman nodded and smiled.  They would keep the pregnancy.

Little Hat sat in the wide elbow of what was once greater Hatteras Island.  Seawater bites at the shoreline daily, decreasing land for settlement.  Little hat is getting ever littler, and the little community must increasingly go afar for food and supplies.  But crossing the water... crossing the water is no light activity.  Sometimes the water bites more than just the shoreline.

Little Hat was ruled from the water, from beneath green and blue waves of frothing sea.  She was down there, with her parade of sagging dead puppets.  Everyone in Little Hat knew that she wasn’t an agent of the local Lord, a petty and lazy Ankine noble from some alien realm, but he did nothing to usurp her authority, ignoring all complaints against her.  Whether she ruled with official approval or not, the Hag did rule and rule terribly.

Stones were stacked into squat towers at the shores edge to signify a place of sacrifice.  She requested the founding stone from the old courthouse to be the altar, masonic symbols and dates barely visible on the weathered stone.  On this altar monthly were laid the best and heartiest gathered goods from the ground, water, and ruins.  Yearly, under the lamp of the fat winter's moon, a human life was to be left for her.  She would take any life, if the year's offerings had made her fat.  If the year had been slim, and so very often the diet these years had indeed been slimming, then a firstborn was to be given over for the Hag's meal.  Even more terribly, she liked to eat with an audience.

Nolan was born with a weapon that could one day change all of that.  Roman tried to drown his son, born naturally to his wife when such things were now forbidden.  Marietta stood quietly on, swaddling the infant Brom.  Born a year ago, before just before the Queen’s Judgment, Brom suckled while his brother drowned.  in her arms while the water quietly bubbled with baby's breath.  But just before the last life was squeezed from the pale, blank-eyed child, Roman's mind changed.  He felt something move in his mind and he rescued the child. 

The Outsiders do not know the mind's of men.  They cannot read our thoughts or know our intentions.  Their sorcerers are aware of human emotions, and have a sensitivity to body language that can fool men into believing their minds lay open.  Men have no such weapons against the Elf, or at least, most men.

Sometimes a child is born with abilities wholly natural and powerful, unknown and unpleasant to all the Outsiders that came to Earth during the Brilliant Conquest.  Such a child has natural affinity for the powers wielded by the Outsiders themselves.  A child that can read and confuse minds, move objects.  A child with the will to wield real power to force reality to his will and become a sorcerer himself.

Magic can be learned by anyone, the forceful manipulation of the universe through the gross power of the will.  Sometimes a mind is born with the tools to work the world without the bluntness of a fist, instead with the subtlety of a knife.

Roman and Marietta claimed that he was Brom’s twin, and no one in the town objected, such was the support for the Queen’s Judgment in those early days.  Roman shaved the unnaturally white hair from his child's head, while mother Marietta told the town he was blind, for his eyes never developed any color.  Nolan learned to act the part, carrying a cane carved by his brother at all times.  And so the years passed, the town quietly hoping that maybe Nolan was the way out from under the watery rule of the Hag, Sweetsupper Sue.