short stories
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Marrishland generates heros and explorers in every aspect of society, from mundane to magocrat. It is an epic culture. Read the story of Sven Takraf in our book.
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Stories of Marrishland
Welcome to our growing collection of Mar stories. Most of these were preserved for centuries by the oral traditions of Marrishland before the invention of writing allowed them to be recorded in a more permanent form. For this reason, the version of these stories you hear in your travels through Marrishland might be very different from these.
The Mar are known throughout the world for their love of epic stories. These tales are divided into shorter stories much the way one might expect to see chapter divisions in a Flecterran romance. All the stories posted so far are a part of the mapmaker tradition. While not all Mar heroes are mapmakers, no small number of favorite stories involve these notorious adventurers in one way or another.
The Gift of Magic (Last Updated 2/8/06)
Weard Darflaem earned the highest honor in Marrishland's history by discovering how the Mar use magic. He's the reason why every magic-user is called a weard. Here's the tale of his discovery and its immediate effects on the Mar culture.
Mapmaker, Magocrat, and Mundane (Last Updated 8/8/05)
Composed by a Kafthean trying to write like a Mar, this story plays with the stereotypes of the mapmaker, the mundane, and the magocrat — stock characters of Mar comedy.
Memory of Seruvus (Last Updated 6/13/05)
A Kalkoraen author tells the story of the first Seru to travel to Domus Palus. Told as a series of memoir-like entries.
The Adventures of Reur (Last Updated 10/3/05)
The continuing story of Reur — regarded by the Mar as the first mapmaker. It is a actually a collection of shorter stories that have been arranged chronologically into a saga. It is an example of the Mar mapmaker tradition — any story about the adventures of a reckless and foolish explorer who survives trials through a combination of cleverness, stubborness, and dumb luck.
Affe and the Drakes (Last Updated 4/5/05)
These stories tell the tale of Affe — a veteran mapmaker shortly before the Marrishland Massacre who is sent by the Mardux to investigate strange rumors of an invasion by a previously unknown civilization. She soon finds herself caught up in the mechanations of a magocrat who is either a hero or a traitor to all of Marrishland.
Tryggvi Fuchs and the Giens (Last Updated 11/14/2005)
The story of the most famous Mar hero during the First Gien Invasion. Tryggvi is a dark character with no mercy for his enemies. His willingness to aid the damnens in order to oppose the Giens places his star in the constellation of the Mass.
Niktoti Band (Last Updated 12/11/05)
The story of Garm Niktot, one of the Mar rescued by Weard Berjer Niktot and his Niktoti Band.
A Note on Narrative Voice and Authorship: Most of these stories have two distinct voices — the storyteller and the scholar. Since each story is a part of Mar oral tradition and not the collected works of a single writer, the storyteller often varies from one story to another. Likewise, the footnotes are the work of a Mar scholar who has studied the story, but since Mar scholarship is also not the product of a single person, the footnotes of different stories are not necessarily written by the same scholar. For the sake of simplicity, each story on this site only has one storyteller and one scholar.
The voices of the storyteller and scholar are not the voices of the authors (i.e. Matt and Eric). We decided it would be more believeable to write stories from the Mar oral tradition that, like historical accounts found in the literature of our own world, were not free of the prejudices and history of those who composed them. And like Earthly scholars, Mar scholars do not know everything that has happened in all of history with perfect clarity and accuracy, so the voice of the scholar is the voice of a knowledgeable but not infallible authority on the story he or she is annotating.
Posted by Matt on 2/6/06: Eric's decision to make our writing from voices that aren't ours saved me tons of headaches. It completely allowed me to write within a much more general frame of reference, because the storyteller would exaggerate or make things up. So these fictional accounts did not always have to fit with the history of Marrishland, much of which was not written when I started work on things.
