A celebration. A truck. A crash. Darkness. A voice. Then light. Myself? A new born child. Half-bull, half-man. The world? Somewhere else. Somewhere fantastical. The voice, again: "Save them. This is why you yet live: to save them." Ah. So that was how it was going to be, then? It was what it was, I had to suppose.-----A history professor from our world found himself dead from an automobile accident; soon enough, though, he found himself instead brought back to life in another world, one of fantasy and strange, inhuman creatures. A story told a thousand times over, and one that everyone knows.And yet, the newly reborn Ardrin was familiar with the other story being told inside of that first one: A decadent, centuries old dwarven empire, increasingly reliant on foreign peoples to fill out its military as its own people grew lazy and complacent. Minotaurs - the race Ardrin had found himself reincarnated as - had been mercenaries loyal to the empire for a hundred years... That is, before the dwarves decided to cut out the middleman and simply enslave the minotaurs directly as battle thralls. Entire slave towns were soon established, and minotaur boys were taken from their families at preciously young ages to train for and fight in the empire's military.It was a story that Ardrin had seen unfold countless times across our own history; he had seen it unfold with the Romans and the foederati, with Egypt and the Mamluks, with Milan and the condottieri, with the Ottomans and the Janissaries.

And Ardrin knew that the same story that he had found himself in the middle of - the story of the dwarves and the minotaurs, the same situation as all of the others - would unfold in the same way, would unfold along the lines of historical inevitability. Even so, all stories - even the historical ones - required characters to make the plot unfold. Who was it, then, that would be the the dwarven empire's Odoacer, its Shajar al-Durr, its Francesco Sforza, its Skanderbeg?"Save them. This is why you yet live: to save them."Well, he had to suppose, it was what it was. Fine, then. Ardrin would be the story's protagonist. If nothing else, Ardrin was a lover of history, and there was nothing else that a lover of history enjoyed more than being the one to make history. And Ardrin? He would be sure to make plenty of it.