Herr D, who by the way is my muse, seeing as how he’s the greatest EVER, was kind enough to write up a sweet bit of backstory for one of my older characters, Wembley the forest troll. Enjoy!
Wembley wasn’t well liked, even for a forest troll. He wasn’t a runt, but his littermates treated him like one. Yet, he lived. No one ever figured out who taught him the human word ‘sorry’ or how he figured out what an apology even WAS. But he apologized to an elder troll for killing a littermate and was immediately cast out. Trolls being on the solitary side, that was something rather eventful.
Wembley found a human home where the inhabitants were always drunk, and therefore, always louder than necessary. He listened to them, and with a stolen children’s book, taught himself to read and write. He wrote field guides for the ‘human-missed’ creatures in the forest: how to care for them, heal them, feed them, etc. Wembley was wise; he knew the ‘human-missed’ creatures were becoming fewer as the humans took up more room. He entrusted his field guides to a group of pixies, who endlessly taunted the trolls they wanted dead with the knowledge that a relative of THEIRS was a learned archivist and author. The taunting resulted in rampages, and the rampages resulted in near-extermination.
The books are currently missing. Three precious pages have been recovered. Wembley did some fine work, indeed. The text is in Swedish, American, transliterated Forest Troll, and an unknown version of what may be a Sprite language. The illustrations are good, too!