Chapter 1

Before we start down the path of this story, let me first give a little insight into my past and the events that lead to my fateful decision.

When I was a boy I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps. He was an assassin and a spy for a powerful tribe leader, eventually heading up the entire clandestine arm of that leader's army before he retired to farming. He had made enough money and earned enough rapport with the tribe leader to get such a coveted position and was able to get quite a large plot of land. Having earned such rapport with the tribe leader, my father was allowed to give his land to an heir when he died, I was set to be that heir. We farmed many things such as cabbage, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and beans among other things. Armed with his knowledge from his days in clandestine operations my father also found great success in cultivating many poisonous and medicinal plants, unlike most other children I learned how to identify these plants and their properties from a young age.

As my father's heir, he had begun teaching me the skills that lead him to his success. He had begun by teaching me weapon skills, namely daggers and bows. While my mother was ok with me learning how to handle weapons, we did live in quite a dangerous world after all, she had made it clear that she wanted me to take a different path in life. I was 15 and had been learning the more complex clandestine skills such as camouflage, espionage, interrogation, tracking, and poison creation and application for a couple of years. The summer after I turned 15 my mother forcefully sent me to the Scholar Academy, telling my father if I went any further down this path that it would be to late for me to do anything else, it was there I learned my trade as a Historian.

I spent three years there learning everything from research skills to the documentation of current events. After losing all the pre-breakdown history and having very little preserved during the 300 Year War, the Scholar Academy made it clear that a Historians duty is not only to learn about the past but to also preserve the present for the future. After graduating from the Scholar Academy I was given the rank of Novice. Every Scholar Academy graduate has the opportunity to be named to the head of their field by the World Scholar Association if they were worthy, regardless of who their parents may or may not have been everyone was on equal footing in the Scholar's Brotherhood. My mother preferred this for me because of the lack of danger. Scholars were at the center of a lot of raids however unlike combatants there was a heavy emphasis to not kill scholars in combat, we are much more valuable alive than dead after all. While they may not be killed in raids they were frequently enslaved for the knowledge they possessed and accumulated during their lifetime, this was in part due to the fact that not everyone could access the knowledge of the Scholar's Brotherhood. The Brotherhood required you to be a graduate to access even the most basic information under their control and the more advanced the knowledge the higher the rank you must achieve to access it. This was the driving force behind the capture and enslavement of scholars. Any scholar found during a raid was likely to be captured and carried back to the raiding tribe's territory and any scholar found to be living in hiding was often hunted down and captured. They were also paid for their work by the World Scholar Association, although it wasn't as much as a combatant at a similar rank.

After I graduated from the Scholar Academy I headed back to my family's farm. The Tribe Leader there had promised that I would not be enslaved and would be allowed to stay on the farm, as long as I worked as a Historian for him. As far as I knew this was an unprecedented offer, the freedom of living in isolation but the protection of working for a Tribe Leader, so of course, I jumped at the opportunity. Upon returning home I had two days to get unpacked and report to the Scholar Building inside the village. On the second morning, I woke up, put on my scholar robes, and started packing my tools.

I started out the door when chaos descended, a clandestine team had been sent to steal me into the servitude of another Tribe Leader. While I had been gone the Tribe Leader I was set to work for had started stealing scholars from neighboring tribes. I was on a farm, outside the defenses of the village which made me an easy target. I was tackled back into the house by a masked figure and two more came over the top of us, ready to fend off anyone coming to my rescue.

I was in a daze as my father came around the corner, catching the men by surprise by his quick appearance and the ferocity with which he attacked. He slammed the first one's head into the wall knocking him out. He made short work dispatching the other man as I forced the man who had tackled me off. The fight spilled outside as my father and the masked man who had tackled me collided, they were nearly an even match. My father was the more skilled of the two but he was much older and out of practice, however, despite this, he had started to gain the upper hand. Suddenly my father was struck by an arrow, quickly followed by another. Time seemed as if it went in slow motion as I noticed the two men standing at the edge of our field. I looked back at my father as he started to crumple to the ground, and I ran. I ran as fast as I could to the horse tied up by the road leading to our house. I had already saddled her earlier as I was supposed to be heading to the village that morning. I jumped on my horse, named Nepril, and took off. I had planned on going to the village and alerting the soldiers there as to what happened, seeking the promised protection from the Tribe Leader, however, the road was blocked off by two more bowmen and the cart I assumed was meant to carry me back to their tribe. I veered off into the woods, and I ran. I never looked back, father taught me to always look where I was going not where I'd been, so I never looked back. Everyone knows that these kinds of things happened to scholars, that's why all who could lived in seclusion to avoid being the property of a Tribe Leader, the only reason I came back to live in the open in the tribal territory was the unprecedented living arrangement offered to me. I ran with the sole purpose of getting away and finding a place where I could live in peace and not be hunted like an animal. As I left I thought about my mother's reasons for wanting me to become a Scholar and began to question their validity in the real world. I had followed her path, a true scholar, and violence still found its way to my door.