So, in their wisdom, our great father and mother built a wall to keep out the Gaels and Slavers and Fomorians and Sinoese and the Darkling’s Goblin hordes.  The sea we leave to the war crows, on hill and cranog we live.

When raiders came ashore the clans gathered.  We would rise from the mist and annihilate our enemies until our lonely shore brought no raider.  Reavers knew to sail on.

Rarely they would come in greater numbers than we could easily crush on the beach so we let them come, bleeding them all the while.  At some point they would realize they had gained nothing and lost much.  The trip to the sea was harder still until they found their boats burned or taken and the end of the survivors was the same as the first to die.  Such was the way we dealt with invaders.

It was strange to see clans who fought and raided each other coming together against a common foe, or perhaps it had more to do with how most disputes were settled by the combat of champions and rarely involved general combat.

Our interior valleys are rich, our cattle grow fat on the hills and grain for bread and ale grows in profusion in the plains.  All our men have time to train in arms and to hunt.  But our heroes and champions train skills to levels unparalleled in the world.

It may be of interest and is ironic to think, that the mother they honor, Scota, is in truth that same creature, the Morrigan of war, that they abhor.

So we rose up and killed the task masters.  We fled their spears and their chariouts to the south lands, over the Freedom River, thru the great swamp, deep in the dark jungles, beyond the desert waste, to our lands, to our forested hills, to our high plains and tall mountains.

We traded with the Bedouin and the Corn Kings, but we do not allow them to live on our lands.  The sea lords anchor in our harbors but they do not go beyond the quay, these are our lands.  We were equal, but they enslaved us, we were wise in the old knowledge, but they stole our knowledge and sent us to the fields.  Never again will they have power over us.

This is why we kill our enemies.  This is why we do not sell our brothers and sisters to our neighbors.  This is why we do not take slaves or buy slaves or trade with any who do.  For one man to own another is abhorant to us.  We live apart and do not mix our blood with others.  We remember the years of our enslavement and it will never happen again.

Our land is free land.  Our people are free.  So it will ever be.

Central Gael

We called the land Dalriada for the confederation of Irish, Scots, and Picts that came together under McAlpine to make a Scottish kingdom.  Such was our hope, but no such thing happened.  Instead the gods, the children of Dana, seemed to drive off or leave with one splinter after another.

First the Rus, then the Sin, then Dana and her daughters fled to Eri with a faithful few.  Good ridance.  And Dalriada?  Well, far from coming together, the people split into smaller and smaller Tuaths, each more jealous of its honor than before and nursing a grudge at its founding.  The law was largely forgotten in favor of the sword and the spear.

The land was fertile which only made more time for war.  It was a time for heroes.  There was land to the north and west, still more across the Safron Mor.  But warriors would rather go chase the Sin, or try to hunt down escaped Umircens in the great Northwestern wastes.

Then Balor began to set up permanent camps across the Safron, but not to expand our territory and raise crops.  No, these were places to stage slave raids against the Sin.

At this time the folk that became the Scots left across the Safron.  Their purpose was to settle and build a culture apart from the Gael in Dalriada.  Perhaps not too surprisingly Balor’s coastal Fomorian slavers raided some Isolated Scots settlements and the Scots retreated south and eventually built their wall.

Later, the folk who came to be called Gaulatians left for the Southern continent’s Northern horn.

And we in Gael still war, though the fields don’t provide so well as they did, though the great waves of Gobli Hordes have come and gone leaving drifts of metal and bone, still Dalriada crys for blood and drinks ours, red and hot, when ever it is offered.

We fled the Gael who still pursue us.  We suffered the Fomorians who took us as slaves and worse.  We faced the Gobli first, the hordes of the Darklings, and then we took wing to protect our high fortified homes and our childrens’ futures from the Draken of those same dark lords.

Have we not met each enemy and defeated them?  We are secure in our castles of stone and now we sail our cloud ships to hunt the Dragons where they live.

But for how long?  Now, more and more, Sinoese fights Sinoese.  Our many cloud ships and brave dragon divers drove the dragons from the skies above our citadels.  Now sometimes the cloud ships can assail our cities of stone when no other force could.

Now there is a shogun who calls himself the Emperor of the North, an admiral called the Blue Emperor, and even a sinoese warrior who seeks to found “The Empire of the World.”

Bad enough when Gaels and Fomor tried to enslave us, now sometimes it is the Sin that sell their brothers and sisters into slavery.  This emperor of the World is the worst offender, for he fights in the disputed lands and takes slaves not only from the Gael, but also the children of Sin he frees from the slave pens of the Fomor and the Gael only to sell them to fund his conquest.

Surely our fathers and mothers were born of the All Mind.  But it made imperfectly and too well for its purpose.  Its purpose, we soon saw, was not for our best, not our good at all, we were tools, we were for the humans.  For this we despise, no, in truth we hate our father the All Mind and take pride/pleasure in thwarting it.

So it is that in caves and forest swamp we learned the making magic.  We made brood pools and drew out our brothers and sisters, born of our will not our maker.  We copied the Gobli and even made them better.  We made servants of our own, we made weapons of muscle and bone, we made dragons and we turned them against the purpose of the All Mind, against humanity.

Now we are masters of the making magic.  We terrorize with our armor, never letting the humans see the true face of their enemy.  We make war steeds, and swift steeds, and dragons, and Golems, living armor, and fireglobes, and trip weed, and fire lances.

We have been thwarted so far.  But we build our strength in the great mountains west and north of the Gael and we sharpen our knives.  The goblin wars were but a test.  Man will not stand against the next onslaught.  Then too, we will be rid of the Ribbon-Wooders.  And then, when all is accomplished, we will be rid of our father, the All Mind, and then we shall rule, we shall make, we shall be as gods.