TORRAG'S Biography

Torrag was born on a bone-chilling, dark night in a small Vykan village in the far north of Snoozeeland called Sibnerzia.  It was the dead of winter and a violent, snowy blizzard with ferocious wind, bellowing thunder, and fierce lightning was pounding the village.  His mother had recently travelled there from a great distance with a group of nomads who crossed the frozen tundra each year in search of goods to trade for the coming spring and summer.

The group didn’t have much money, so they would set up their temporary shelters whenever they arrived in a new place.  The shelters provided good protection against the rain and sun, but they were not very good at protecting against the cold.  So, on the night Torrag was born, it was difficult to keep him warm; it was about the worst night in memorable history.  His color was very dark.  Some of the nomads who were in the shelter to help with his birth swear that Torrag emitted a slight glow in the darkness, and that was the only way they knew he was alive.

As the years passed, Torrag didn’t usually have other kids around to play with.  He was frequently in transit, traveling from one place to the next with his mother’s nomadic group, constantly in search of food and trading opportunities.  But one spring, while back in Sibnerzia for a couple of weeks, he met another kid named Scully.  He and his mother lived in Sibnerzia year round while Scully’s twin brother and father spent a lot of time in the southern part of Snoozeeland where his father made a living fishing because there were many more fish in the tropical waters there.

Torrag and Scully quickly became friends and often played a game they made up with sticks and rocks.    One day, the two were wondering through a field, playing their stick game, when they came upon a vibrant green bush that had bright purple berries growing on it.  Torrag was almost always hungry, so to find this bush was very good news.

He immediately went to pick some of the berries to eat them, but then stopped. From years of travelling over land and coming across different types of plants and bushes, he vaguely remembered a saying about the number of leaves on a branch that is supposed to help people know whether the berries on a bush are okay to eat, or if they’re poisonous. It went something like: ‘If there’s three, let it be. If there’s two, four, or more, it’s a score.’ But he couldn’t remember for sure; and not all the branches on this bush had three leaves.

His hunger was growing stronger as he looked at the fruit.  He wasn’t sure what to do.  Just then, he said to Scully, “Hey Scully, I have to go to the bathroom, but I’m hungry and I’m going to eat all the berries on this bush, could you try one and let me know if they’re sweet or sour?”  Torrag didn’t really have to go to the bathroom; it was just something he made up so that Scully would try the berries first.  Torrag went around behind the trunk of a large tree to make it look like he was actually going to go.  The sky above, which had been bright blue, quickly started darkening with thick, grey, swirling clouds.  The wind started to pick up out of nowhere.  Torrag could feel the temperature dropping as he peered out from behind the tree trunk.  He could see Scully pick one of the bright purple berries and pop it into his mouth without a worry.  As Torrag emerged from behind the tree, Scully suddenly dropped to his knees, grabbed his throat as his eyes rolled back, and then fell flat on his face.

Torrag ran over to Scully and reached down to touch his back.  Scully was unconscious.

That’s the precise moment that everything in the universe changed.

The sky darkened to almost black, pebble-sized hail crashed down from above, the wind picked up to tornado-like intensity, a thunderous boom echoed through the land, and a tremendous flash of lightning illuminated all of Snoozeeland.

The dark clouds in the sky swirled faster and faster until a hole started to open.  It was as black as black can be, no light could escape it.  The hole grew in size as Torrag looked upward to see it expanding.  A beam of energy reached down and sucked Torrag up into the sky.  He swirled around and around while ascending upward into the black hole.  Then the hole closed and the dark clouds and wind quickly disappeared.  Torrag was never seen again….