Chapter 1: 0 – The Taming of Ondlangr

If you were to step onto the shore of Ondlangr, you would see nothing but endless, rolling waves of dark stone. No trees, no rivers, not even grass or soil. Just rock and fog stretching out to the horizon. The only breaks in the landscape are the occasional craters or crevasses that cut into some of the island's vast cave systems.

While there is no flora, Ondlangr's fauna is plentiful... and incredibly deadly. Breaking all of nature's rules, the wildlife of the island consists only of predators who prey on other predators. No one knows for sure how the food chain there came to work in such a bizarre way. Some say only a creature with killer instinct could survive in a place as cruel as Ondlangr to begin with. Others believe the island was made by the gods as a place to lock away their most horrible miscreations. Or maybe it was a breeding ground, an attempt by the gods to spawn some kind of world-ending beast over millenia of natural selection.

There was more myth around Ondlangr than fact. Nobody wanted to go there, not even to do research or draw up an accurate map. And while most myths exaggerated their subjects, the stories about the desolate rock crawling with giant, carnivorous monsters came nowhere close to describing its true brutality.

One would have to be either insane or desparate to try and settle such a barren, hostile wasteland. The dark elves were both.

Banished from their homeland for exploring the blackest realms of magic, teleported to an infertile island in the middle of the ocean, the only logical choice for the dark elves would be to lay down and die. After all, they had been stripped of the powers their experimentations had brought them. They had even been robbed of their standard elven magic, their expanded lifespans, everything.

The elves had lost the arts of farming and city building long ago. Once magic was discovered, mundane skills became hopelessly outmoded. The now-powerless dark elves couldn't even manage the most minor of cantrips, spells so simple even a child could perform them with the ease of blowing away a feather. Taming a backyard garden was beyond them. How could they ever hope to conquer a place like Ondlangr?

No spells, no tools, no knowledge of the harsh landscape they now found themselves stranded on. They had nothing. Nothing but spite.

Exile wasn't on the mind of the elves who sent them to this rock; execution was. This was an extended death sentence, handed out for seeking new magics that could revolutionize elven society. All because some old books written ages ago said it was wrong.

Spite was a force even stronger than black magic. Animated by spite, driven by spite, fueled by spite, the dark elves did the impossible, spitting in the face of reason. They carved out a life for themselves in a place synonymous with death.

The first shelter they found was within a wide ravine. While the chasm's floor was as dark and barren as the rest of the island, no monsters called the place home. Despite its size, the ravine didn't connect to the wider undeground environment of connected caves. Monsters didn't tend to settle in areas like that, where there were no easy escape routes - it meant a swift death if another monster found their hiding place. 

Just hiking down to the bottom of the ravine was a challenge. Then the dark elves had to deal with the issue of resources. Water could be collected from rain and stagnant pools, though it wasn't very clean. Without trees, getting wood was out of the question, and without plants or soil, cultivating crops for food was also a no-go. Elven society was broadly vegetarian, but the dark elves would have to cast away those customs to survive.

Hunting became the center of the dark elf lifestyle. Many men died in the early hunts, where they relied on sharpened rocks, slings, and other crude tools. The bones and scales of the monsters could be used to craft far sharper weapons, and the hides of the mammalian beasts could be used for armor. Hunting only became safer and more effective as the months passed. All of these materials could also be used for more civil purposes as well: bone and hide became primitive tent shelters, wool and fur made for warm garments, and monster fat could be rendered down into fire-fueling oil.

As hunting tactics refined and stockpiles grew, expansion was inevitable. Monster bone pickaxes were able to break apart rock. Shelters developed from rough tents to buildings hewn into the ravine's walls or constructed from stone bricks. Wells were drilled to harvest underground water reserves. The ravine blossomed into a city, and in a few years buildings stretched from one corner to the other.

Eventually, they ran out of rocky floor to build on. The limited land lead to a far more vertical kind of construction than the elves had back in the homeland. With up being the only direction to go, the dark elves built buildings atop other buildings, stacking them high with monster bone reinforcements. A web of rope bridges and pathways connected the tiered cityscape. The ravine would become known as Skysplit, the heart of the dark elves' society.

But the dark elves had aspirations beyond a single ravine. Mining lead to the discovery of underground resources, deposits of coal and other raw ores. It also let them connect to Ondlangr's vast cave systems.

Exploring these massive caverns, they discovered new kinds of monsters and areas rich with unfamiliar ores. They even found small grottos lush with plant life; thick moss, twisting luminescent vines, even small bushes that bloomed colorful flowers. By this point, they had already adapted to an all-meat diet, but the edible lichens the cave-trawlers discovered added something new to the plates of dark elves.

Over time the dark elves spread, establishing settlements throughout the Ondlangr underground. Most were built around valuable mining sites or the few fertile grottos where they could grow plants. Tunnels were carved out to connect all of these small villages, each one linking back to the ravine where this new society had started. Some dark elves were even brave enough to build on the surface, but none of these places were residential, solely hunting outposts.

For 300 years this growth has continued, and for 300 years, the dark elves have been lead by the blood of Edda.

You are reading story The Prisoner Prince at novel35.com

You can find story with these keywords: The Prisoner Prince, Read The Prisoner Prince, The Prisoner Prince novel, The Prisoner Prince book, The Prisoner Prince story, The Prisoner Prince full, The Prisoner Prince Latest Chapter