The Legend of Lefty

I can think of no better way to describe the town of Ash-Tab, than to say it's in the middle of nowhere. Usually that phrase is meant as a metaphor, but in the case of Lefty’s home town, it was literal. Ash-Tab had been built in the middle of The Golden Desert, a vast sandy wasteland nearly devoid of all life. It lay on the southern tip of Att, cut off from the ocean by towering rocky cliffs, and cut off from the rest of the continent by the Grungle Mountains. No road or river led to Ash-Tab, and few maps marked its existence. Their only contact with the outside world came in the form of a single trade route, with another small town which was almost as strange.

That town, known as Opprobrium, lay just on the other side of the mountains. And though it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, it was certainly adjacent to nowhere. Like all small towns it has its share of quirks, but for now the only thing you need to know is that the inhabitants of Opprobrium had a certain… fixation. An absolutely insatiable desire for the one and only resource that the desert dwellers had in abundance; sand. They loved sand. Couldn’t get enough of it. And for reasons unknown even to me, they didn’t mine it themselves.

So, once a month, the entire Ash-Tabian merchant guild, all eight of them, would load up their carts with barrels of sand and haul them to the foot of the mountains, where traders from Opprobrium would meet them to exchange it for food, water, wood, metal, cloth, and anything else the Ash-Tabians needed. It was through this trade alone that the small desert town managed to sustain itself… though the amount of sand needed was… excessive.

It required that every citizen work as a sand miner… which almost sounds like a respectable profession, but In truth it was more of a chore than a job. You go out into the dunes with a shovel and a barrel, and you use the former to fill the latter. It's not especially difficult or technical- a child could do it. In fact children did do it. Residents of Ash-Tab became sand miners as soon as they were strong enough to hold a shovel. They started with small barrels of course, but every year they graduated to a larger one. Until, at the age of nineteen, they became an adult in the eyes of the town council… and were granted an adult sized barrel… along with an adult job, which they were expected to perform in addition to sand mining. And while Ash Tab had two doctors, a cobbler, a blacksmith, some merchants obviously, and a handful of masons… most of its citizens… were guards.

You see, Ash Tab was built in the middle of nowhere for a reason. The people who founded the town… well… let's say they valued their privacy. They considered their settlement to be a treasure, and they did not want to share that treasure with the outside world. And though the original settlers were dead by the time of our story, their descendants carried on that legacy like it had been drilled into their heads since birth.

Duty is the word I associate most with Ash-Tab. It was all they had. Most places have art and culture; a heritage that gets passed down from generation to generation. But the citizens of Ash-Tab were only given three things by their ancestors; a life, a town, and a duty to use that life to protect that town. And whether it was due to isolation and indoctrination, or the simple fact that there was nothing else to do in the middle of nowhere, the people of Ash-Tab did their duty. They were devoted to defending the treasure of the desert, no matter the cost.

That’s why they built a wall around the town… and used most of their population to guard it. Standing nine hands tall, and wide enough for two men to walk atop it side by side, the wall was nothing to scoff at. It was made of yellow adobe bricks which were not only sturdy, but matched the color of the surrounding sand, making the town difficult to spot from afar. Or at least, it would have, if not for all the guards standing on it. Patrols were kept up day and night, dozens of figures marching ever vigilant across its surface… and you could see the light reflecting off their spears and shields from a distance, even in the moonlight.

This was the strange world Lefty was born into. The second child of two guards, he seemed destined to one day join them on the wall. And in the meantime, he was a sand miner like everyone else, traveling into the desert on a daily basis to shovel up the dunes one barrel at a time.

That was his life, and while he didn’t exactly like it, he didn’t hate it either… because he didn’t like or hate much of anything. In order to have preferences, one must first have options, and Lefty had none. He had to do his duty. He had no choice. How he felt about it didn’t matter.

Overall it was… A life. It’s hard to describe it any other way. It lacked both exciting highs and depressing lows. It was An Existence, nothing more. As Lefty would later say: “Life back then was duty.”

By the time he was eighteen he felt as though he had lived a hundred years in Ash-Tab and yet experienced nothing. There were people, sure, family and even friends… but they were all just as numb as him, all trapped in the same endless monotony. There was never anything to discuss because nothing ever happened. The job of sand mining left plenty of free time, but what could you do with that time when there was nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Despite his age Lefty was practically a blank slate. A drone. Mindlessly going through the same routine, day in and day out, with nothing to look forward to, except eventually marching on the wall; circling the town with everyone else, all in some vain attempt to protect it from a foreign threat that would never arrive.

Later on he’d say that he didn’t truly start living until the day he abandoned Ash-Tab; that he didn’t really have a personality until he left home and experienced the wider world… and while I'm in no position to argue… there must have been some reason he decided to leave. One does not simply walk away from everything they know without a reason. I’m certain that some spark of the man I knew existed back then regardless of what he says now… but I suppose we’ll never know for sure. If he had some greater motivation to desert the desert, he either forgot it or he doesn’t want to share.

Whatever his reasons for leaving, the fact is he left. On a day like any other, seemingly at random, Lefty went out into the dunes to mine some sand… and just kept going. He ditched his barrel in the wastes and walked towards the mountain range in the distance, with nothing but the clothes on his back, a bit of water, and his trusty shovel.

This decision… would kick off a series of events that would later be described as legendary. In the days to come he would journey across the breadth of the kingdom and re-write history as we knew it. He’d face unstoppable monsters. Overcome impossible obstacles. And master a type of magic he didn’t even know existed yet. Warfare, politics, society itself, the science of pneumatics; all would be revolutionized before he was done. And in the process Lefty would end up changing the lives of everyone in Att.. for better or worse.

This day, when Lefty chose to abandon his home town… it would prove to be the second most significant day of his entire life. The most significant… would end up being the day he returned... but then, I'm getting ahead of myself.