Bane of a Nation by A. J. Burns

Author:A. J. Burns [Burns, A. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-09T23:00:00+00:00

18

Enk Arqua

Panther General

Whenever a Raur would murder, the rest of them would condemn that man and shun him from society, returning his deed unto him or casting him to the confinement of prison; whenever a Mesal would murder, the Raurs would condemn them, in their entirety, eventually expelling them from society and banishing them to the confinement of Soten.

It was there, in the outskirts of its capital city, that Enk was born, alongside three-million other outcasts, and it was there that he learned the true meaning of survival. While the other provinces feasted in prosperity, relative or absolute, Soten was the land of the depraved, its people forever in a cycle of grief and bloodshed, a land where children were born into homes without food and where infants died sucking at breasts that produced no milk. In Soten, there was no belief that the strong would survive, only that the weak would perish.

The Mesals in this province had no concept of economics; a man’s worth never exceeded what he could protect. While Enk had witnessed firsthand the atrocities of the Raurs and how their royalty had murdered their own for money and fame, it paled in comparison to the woe the Mesals brought upon themselves; but in Soten, it was not fame or fortune that the scandalous sought out, for the land was so barren and inhospitable that food was the currency.

Fields that could be harvested were, to a citizen of Soten, as castles were to citizens of the other provinces. Whereas the others experienced an occasional famine, Soten experienced an occasional harvest.

When the congregation had expelled the quarantine of Soten, its inhabitants were quick to flee, having moved southward to Grofven and as far east as Parven; but Enk had remained, having never intended to leave his homeland. As grotesque and barbaric as it seemed to outsiders, it was where his mother had labored and died for him, where his father had worked and fought for him.

Tamperil, the city of his birthplace, had been built upon the remnants of a forest: five-hundred acres of tree stumps, the lumber having been exported to the clans before he was born. The Elynaurian and Wostaurian fleets had been constructed with wood from this forest, and one of the Tekotaurian chiefs had built his palace with the timber from a different Sotaurian forest. During the first revolution, when the Vyktaurian chief had encroached on and encamped in the southern woodlands, the Raurs from both allegiances scorched everything in their paths.

They fought in Soten for five months, using its populace as shields and distractions, flinging newborn calves over the walls of fortifications, hoping to infect their enemies with the plague. Whenever one army was forced to retreat, they would infect the Mesals in that area with The Itch; when the war ended, the civilians unfortunate enough to have survived in the areas of conflict were rounded up and placed in the fringes of Rofynen where they were detained and experimented on with hopes of discovering a cure.

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