To Set the Scene
It was deep into the most sweltering days of a particularly horrid summer when the kingdom of Montevive found itself in the guise of an excited child running alongside the crumbling precipice of a great mountain, everyday risking a life-changing fall while still maintaining a curiously tenacious grip onto a life that passes more quickly than could ever be understood, and in the case of this lordly nation, the precipice was a social somersault that was to come about from the rise of one party and the fall of another.
Montevive was, even in its prime—at the apex of which the fall was to come—a small, largely irrelevant kingdom surrounded by various geographical landmarks that made the conquering of it unfeasible to its neighboring countries. To the north, the vast and uncrossable Northern Gash, an immensely wide river, raged westwards, blocking off most communication with whatever exotic nations must have laid over that horizon; to the south, the tranquil waters of The Great Sea expanded far beyond where any known sailor of any of the world’s nations had ever seen; and to finalize the impressive isolation of this tiny nation, the east and west borders were both defined by the skyward-reaching peaks and crags of two seemingly endless mountain chains that formed the spacious valley in which the whole of the nation resided. Over the Eastern Mountains, there was little but trackless wilds that led up to yet another shore of The Great Sea, but over the mountains to the west, referred to as simply The Borders by both the people of Montevive and the nation on the other side, laid the nation of Hinterland, a much larger, more intimidating, and territorial domain that many times through the years had attempted to conquer Montevive for its land and resources. The people of Montevive, though, were of a certain hardy manner of heart, and for them to ever be unwillingly conquered, the conquerors would have to crush wills stronger than any metal or jewel ever found in even the deepest caverns of the ancient earth, a quality of military force that no would-be conqueror has ever had.
To say more of the common man and the upper class that ruled them, the wealth of the nation was poorly distributed to say the least, leaving some to need to steal bread simply to survive and others to need to train with the sword simply so that it was never their bread that was stolen; furthermore, the common man was, more often than not, the one making the bread that another common man would then later steal. That was how those kinds of kingdoms usually went, though, with the poor being desperately wed to the service of the rich and the rich somehow gaining wealth as if gold and silver flowed to them from out the cobblestones of the streets in which they required a carriage to travel.
Before the final century of the nation’s history, however, the coffers of the king’s castle seemed to have been perforated by the lack of economic skills possessed by His Majesty and his court, and so money had a way of occasionally trickling down to fill the pockets of some of the more ambitious and lucky peasants with enough coin to raise them to a bit higher of a social position. At the time of the fall, though, the king hailed from a line of kings whose intellects matched their sword arms, and the holes in the coffers were patched with the congealed blood of the poorer species of man; what’s more, the reigning monarch at the time of these great changes was a shrewd, clever man, and his path to the throne, they say, was marked more by poisoned blood than blood dripping from the losers of honorable duels. The son of the king, the people reasoned, would be even more clever, and even more ruthless, and as such the minds of those plebeians whose minds were not muddled with hunger oftentimes thought that dark times would come with the death of their then current liege.
The king, to further contrast the nobles from the degenerate rabble over which they ruled, thought little of the monetary future, specifically, and was preoccupied more with his growing age. To further complicate the great changes to come, or perhaps to cause them, the king was, as far as he believed, in his dying years, and though he was quite fit for his age, with age comes frailty in one form or another. The wisest among us know that a king’s skill with his ornately-adorned sword cannot stave off Death, the scythe of which is considerably more dangerous than those of the unfortunate peasant farmers over which that king rules.
And thus, with nature on all sides, Hinterland to the east, one king overhead, a future king in the back of their minds, and very little or no coins weighing them down in their pockets, the people of Montevive, be they royal or not, waged the only war they ever knew or were going to know: the war against the faceless society that held them in the uninterruptible grasp of existence, be they just about to be dropped into a grave or just being birthed into that motherly embrace.
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