On the Founding of Menoria
Compiled from oral traditions and surviving court records of Audax. The earliest written account postdates the events it describes by at least two centuries. No contemporary source has been recovered.
Before there was a kingdom, there was a man.
The accounts agree on little, but they agree on this: his name was Audaximus, and the land that would become Menoria was not empty when he arrived. It was full of things with teeth.
The legend holds that Menos himself named him. The Most Daring. It holds that he was blessed by the god of war and honor, and that he drove the creatures from the land alone, one man, one spear, one bare fist.
Whether this is true cannot be established. What can be established is that people believed it. They believed it in his lifetime. They believed it at his burial. They have believed it for five hundred years, in villages and courts and border watchtowers, in the same words, generation after generation.
In Skaldenreach, that kind of belief is not nothing.
The kingdom took the god's name. The capital took the man's, or half of it. Audaximus became Audax. The people kept the courage and forgot the man.
His standard survives unchanged: a bare fist raising a spear, a single thorned vine winding up the arm. The official histories say the vine represents the wild he conquered, carried as a trophy.
The histories do not remark on the fact that the vine is still attached.