The Fall of Thanlor - As told by Jessik Wolfbane
(A short excerpt from 'Wolvesbane - The Story of Lashaan Khi')
by Fox Lee (http://foxlee.arts-eclectic.com)

"I have lived a long time, and when you live, you do many things. You make lovers, friends, allies, enemies. You find love and hate, you find lust and betrayal and sacrifice. You win, and you lose, and sometimes both. But most of all, you remember.
	"It was a year that neither of you were alive to witness. I myself was merely a youth at the time, but young ears are inclined to watch more carefully, and young minds sometimes understand better than their elders. I watched carefully, and I understood. It was a year that would capture my memory, and grip it for a lifetime.
	"Many things happened that year; the northern giants marched on Scathron, the troglodytes gained control of the Southern forests. But nothing was quite as terrible as the great siege of Thanlor.
	"The charge on Thanlor was led by a mighty warlord, a huge, inhuman brute who called himself Lord Arakos of the halfmen. The halfmen, what a fearsome sight! It was terrible to behold them, marching in their ranks upon the fair city, leaving death and destruction a miserable shadow at their heels. Massive, incredibly powerful, undeniably intelligent, and very evil. It is said that they had the souls of wolves, that they had no human blood beneath their furred hides. I choose not to confirm or deny such rumours, but I know this; no human hearts beat in the army of Lord Arakos.
	"The battle lasted many months. The ruler of Thanlor was an Elven king, one Narythaniaus as I remember, as wise and fair a ruler as ever the people had hoped for. He rallied his forces to fight valiantly under his banner, but they were outnumbered drastically by the halfmen. The citadel was taken, but Narythaniaus would not flee his home. He was crucified by those barbarians, strung up on a cross made of his peoples' bones, left for whoever or whatever cared.
	"I was not one of King Narythaniaus' people. I lived in the forest, as I always had, and still do. I had never seen any king before, let alone this one. But when I saw him on that cross, and when I beheld the cruelty and evil that was the halfmen, a kind of courage that I never knew came to me.
"That night, I cut him down from the cross and dragged his broken body away to a ranger 
safehouse, although there was little point. King Narythaniaus was dying, there was no doubting that.
	"He told me of his own childhood, of the history of that beautiful citadel that had been razed to the ground. He told me of warcraft and magic, of great battles and strange lands that I had never imagined to exist. I listened to him talk in awe; it was all I could do. That one man could learn so much in a lifetime was a fact that amazed my child's mind.
	"We gazed at the stars for hours, a dying king and a boy who would be a hero. And eventually, he died. He spent his last breath in farewell to a child he had never even met before that night. 
And it's been eight hundred years since then. Many things have happened in my life - I have grown and learned, I have lost and won, but that night still traps my memory and refuses to release it. It was that night that truly made me who I am, and that night I will hold inside as I avenge the fall of Thanlor."