My father, god bless his soul, was a good man. He worked long hours, for his job and his family. Selling his soul to one of the biggest companies on our local planet, Sin's Corp. A humongous retailer of furniture, my father as a small piece cog in the corporate machine worked away. He drove long nights and days selling furniture to the home owning elite on my planet. You see on my planets like many other C-class planets, it is near feudal in how it operates, the only difference is the small amount of land us “peasants” get. Many of us smashed together in super complexes built to house hundreds of lower-high level employees, from your salesman, to private construction worker. My father being a salesman would go out selling furniture to the wealthy. Many times he had a door shut by those who did not care for what he was selling, sometimes he was beat for those who did not care for how he would live. Being one of the upper-class awarded a level of freedom I and my family could never even dream of.
The Struggle we faced was one of many similar in nature. The outcome only a little different, unlike most who could hold out till they died of old age, my father was a hopelessly depressed man. Through his effervescent smile my mother and older brother would never have uncovered his pain. He would whisper to us stories at night about men who did great things throughout the stars, building huge corporations, or defeating dangerous beast from un-civilized planets. He fueled our dreams that kept us away from our dark reality, it gave us infinite hope in our own futures. His death was sudden we only found out through the quiet slap of a chair against the ground and a the gentle sway of my father in the air. My mother, weak with grief followed my father, leaving my brother and I to clean up the mess of blood she left when the knife tore through her.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
A young child of 8 I remember clearly the notes they both left, filled with their disappointments in themselves and in life the hope that they could sleep peacefully knowing we would come out alright without them.
They were wrong.
My brother was very strong for a boy of 16. He quickly picked up a job cleaning bathrooms of a bar. Dealing with drunken jeers and flainling fist. He was strong, very strong. While we couldn’t afford a house we made do living wherever we could, from squatting in soon to be demolished houses and tent cities with fellow homeless. We struggled day to day me myself becoming very skilled in pickpocketing. We hoped that through our struggle we would see better days.
We didn’t.
My brother was knocked brain dead from a drunken man while cleaning his vomit. I only know because when I went to look for him in the bar and saw him in the dumpster out back. I never knew who did it.
My luck however had begun to turn around when our city’s church’s priest had found me crying next to a dumpster. His name was Rudelius, a large tanned man with a mop of dark brown hair on his head, his face bland except for the two moles left of his nose. He was kind and picked me up whispering to me calming promises on how he would take care of me. Eventually he brought me to the church, I was quick to fall asleep in the bunk bed he gave me despite the numerous young children around me.The city’s abbey was under The Church of Celeste, they praised the stars and their alignments who they believed was overruled by the goddess Celeste. Those who could connect with the stars had received a type of energy that made them live longer, and even gave them odd abilities dependent on the alignment they connected to. Many people wished to connect to an alignment. Very few found one that would match them, however if you were to find one the you could find two and the most skilled could have three. However that was the least of my concerns as now I had a home, somewhere to sleep, with something to eat, and things to learn, and a dream to achieve.