Kamrashim Unstrings His Bow for the Last Time

Kamrashim's hands shook with aggrieved rage as he strung his bow, ready to hunt down the ones who took his future away from him. And how could he not, after looking back to the treasures he and his companions had earned, and forward to the smoldering village where no one lived any longer to recognize his achievements?
He searched the perimeter of the village for the tracks of those who did this, and in short order he found them. It would not be long, he thought, before he would make them pay with their blood. He knew the lay of this land, and it was far from his first time following tracks here.
The craggy slopes echoed with the chanting and hollering of his companions. They felt unstoppable after nearly a decade of learning each other's ways and fighting in unison; they could imagine their next foes cowering, helpless before their coordinated volleys and cover-fire, and those obstinate enough to resist would feel blades of marbled steel against their necks—the same blades they had wrested from the hands of the wealthier and more prestigious Maharan tribe.
But something gave Kamrashim pause. As his troupe mounted the first slope, he laid eyes upon the stump of an ancient fir tree, nearly fossilized in the dry conditions there. He thought it as good a way-marker as any, a reference point his party could use should the winds that ripped through the mountain passes obscure their trail. So it was that he drew an arrow from his quiver, scanning for a suitable place in the stump where he could wedge it.
And he found one—when a jagged piece of flint lodged in the stump's roots caught his eye. He knelt down and inspected the piece, his thumb tracing its divets and its dulled edge, recognizing the crude flintknapping of a younger, less experienced archer.
The voices of his compatriots dulled in his ears as a flood of once-buried memories breached the retaining walls of his mind. He saw Nersheshim hobbling back to their camp, dazed and bruised all over, after the paltry bride-price he'd offered had been rejected with scorn and mockery. His cheeks flushing with outrage and shame on his older brother's behalf. His furious, inconsistent strikes against the flint core as he fantasized about where his arrows would land. He recalled most vividly the arrowhead he'd ruined halfway through crafting it—the one he'd decided was most expendable when he needed a placemarker for his first trek through those same slopes.
The sigh that escaped his lungs was like a heavy cloud finally relinquishing its burden of rain. He let the piece of his old handiwork slip from his hand. The old waymarker had indeed served its purpose, though not the purpose he'd once imagined: He was lost, and from that waymarker, the same one from the days of his early manhood, he realized he was treading the same steps again in much the same anger. He wondered how many more times he would complete this circuit if he continued to follow this old trail. He wondered what good it would do to seek his rivals' comeuppance once again in this world that was increasingly hardening to the pain in his heart. The readied bow that hung over his shoulder, once the source of his sense of pride and purpose, now felt only like a weight holding him down.
So it was that Kamrashim, the greatest archer of Saukkan's many great archers, found his inner peace not in the twang of his bowstring, but in its unstringing.

- Excerpt from the Saukkanese saga Kamrashim Unstrings His Bow for the Last Time, c. 3544 HE.

Kamrashim, a Saukkanese princeling fallen from grace, assembles a band of brigands in hopes of restoring the lost fortune of his downtrodden tribe. Eshawar, a young Haifah shepherd-woman and a slinger without match, leads a guerilla movement to seize her clan's ancestral grazing grounds back from an encroaching city-state. Ashaqir, a camel-riding hunter from the arid expanse of Far Takhet, persists in an escalating blood-feud with a local warlord whose goons killed his father during an act of extortion gone wrong. And Sanjyorvin, a hot-headed nomad of the Verdant Steppe, carves a bloody swath through his own homeland in a wayward quest to find his place in the world.
Ultimately, all of these underdog heroes living in dire times meet the same end: Although their early experiences tell them that violence is the way of this world, and that the only recourse against exploitation is armed resistance, it is in acceptance and surrender that they finally find solace.
Though it is far from the oldest story told across Tahuum Itaqiin, it is likely the most widespread, and its variants are the most unified in their themes and philosophical underpinnings. The tale Kamrashim Unstrings His Bow for the Last Time was spun in the context of the degradation of Saukkan-Ghat's princelings into brigandry and petty rivalry after the deprivations of the Crusade and Reconquest that twice ravaged the Haifatneh Basin. But it is only the earliest known version of this tale, for the civilizational collapse at the end of the Internecine Period precipitated power-grabs by the petty states of the Haifatneh region as well as warlords' contests over the spoils of coastal Takhet in the aftermath of the Reborn Theocracy's retreat from that land. In distant Au-na-Lai, too, a plague which ravaged that realm around the time of the Crusade and Reconquest was the catalyst for a massive upheaval, after which its diverse inhabitants were left to their own devices to eke out an existence in a world that suddenly lacked higher powers to prevent violence and defend their interests.
Although these tales were handed down by storytellers from vastly different cultures, a shared set of circumstances is reflected in their pyrrhic endings as well as their philosophical underpinnings. In these tellings, contentment and inner peace is not found by struggling against malevolent forces in a broken world that is largely beyond one's control. Rather, as Kamrashim and his counterparts in distant lands all learn, they can best find satisfaction in focusing on what they can control: Their inner lives and their sense of self. Even in the early years of the Revival Era, as borders are now relatively settled and hierarchies of power are largely stabilized, these stories still resonate the underclasses of bustling cities and the neglected villages of the frontiers alike.