I decided to explore the world a bit more, and setup some stuff for later. I've got the 2 side chapters, and am working on a new chapter in the main story. I'll try to get it out tonight. So without further ado, here are the side chapters. Thanks for reading.
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Lis and Abby had travelled for a week to reach Karn from their village of Lotus Field. Their horse was old, and he had a bit of trouble carrying the two of them, but they were light. Their village, like so many around them, was on the verge of dying out. The village once boasted a population of almost two hundred people, but when the military passed through they ‘recruited’ every able bodied man under imperial decree. The village had expected to lose most of the young men, but the captain of that unit wasn’t very picky. Even old man Carlyle was taken, and he was in his fifties; Little Jeff and Edward were only twelve.
Some of the women were recruited, like Serva and Ellis, who had been adventurers at one point before settling down to raise a family. The military preferred to take just the men, but according to the Captain, if you were registered as an adventurer, you were considered ‘combat capable’. When the military left there were eighty women and five men left in the village, and a six year old boy named Bret.
Shortly after the military left, trouble came. A battle broke out to the north, near the village of Willow’s Creek. Only five locals made it out alive, the Kilsey sisters, and were taken in by Lotus Field. The imperial military had been pushed back, and Quesh forces over ran the village gates. The few men, too old or feeble to ‘serve’ the military, tried to hold the gate, but a massive blast of fire from an enemy mage killed them. The imperial forces, including those people taken from the village, were wiped out.
After that, people started to get sick. Grandma Celia said it was magic disease, targeting imperial forces…but it hit the village just the same. Twenty women fell sick and died, along with the Bret, before Grandma Celia managed to quarantine them. Celia had a bit of healing magic, but she couldn’t save anyone. Even now she was sick herself, and getting worse.
Lotus Field still had a few farms with fallow fields, and mostly empty shops, but there was no traffic anymore. Grandma Celia had managed to put up some weak magical defenses to keep out monsters, and hopefully no more armies would be battling nearby, but the village had a long term problem to solve. Thus Grandma Celia had sent Lis and Abby out with one mission, to try and bring back some men to the village. Celia gave them all of the money she had saved over the years, which came up to almost fifteen gold Centas; It was more than either Lis or Abby had ever seen in their lives, though they were barely twenty.
“Wow, this place is huge!” Abby said in amazement as she glanced around at the shops filled with people. Abby and Lis were fairly pretty young women, which was probably why Grandma Celia had sent them. A few men glanced their way occasionally, but paid no more than a moment’s notice, likely due to the threadbare appearance of their clothing.
“Focus Abby, Grandma Celia gave us a mission…” Lis said holding up an old map that Grandma had given her for Kern.
“I know, but there are men everywhere. Can’t we just ask some?” Abby asked with a wide smile on her face.
“Well, we can post an advertisement with the guild, at least that’s what Grandma Celia said…but few people will risk it.” Lis said with a frown, and scratched her head and thought, her nose wrinkling. When she glanced up she spotted a small contingent of soldiers leading a group of battered men in chains, barefoot through the streets.
“I wonder where they’re taking them.” Abby said tilting her head in confusion, a not unusual look for her. Lis often thought Abby was dropped on her head as a child, but Abby was affable and sweet, so Lis was patient.
“They’re prisoners I think…Maybe to execution?” Lis said the last as a question.
“Slavery actually.” A man’s voice interrupted them from behind, causing Lis and Abby to turn startled. The voice was attached to a man wearing an imperial military uniform, and holding a leather ledger in his hand. The man marked something down in the ledger, and motioned to the chained men.
“…Why? What did they do?” Abby asked confused
The man in uniform slipped his ledger under his arm and looked the girls over. “Deserters mostly. Those who aren’t executed on the spot are sold to the slave markets. The military can turn a small profit on their cowardice at that point, which goes to fund better equipment for the troops.” He said explaining with a shrug. “If they desert close enough to a city, they’re usually sold. If it’s nearer the fighting, or out at the fringes, they execute them to avoid having to waste personnel shipping them back. As it is, they’ll probably end up in mines” He adds.
“So…someone can just buy them?” Lis asked, a bit hopeful.
“For the right price…why, are you young girls in need of a bunch of cowards?” the man asked with a smirk on his face.
“Yes! We need men!” Abby said as she caught on. “Can we buy them?” she asked with a bit of excitement in her voice.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The uniformed man frowned at Abby but seeing the hopeful look on her and Lis’s faces, paused to consider, looking them over. “Why don’t you step into my office, and tell me what’s going on. I’m Lieutenant Nathaniel Simmens, by the way.” He said extending a hand to the girls.
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“Captain Shelly…Why am I not surprised.” Lieutenant Simmens said after listening to a rather prolonged and difficult to decipher overlapping monologue from Lis and Abby. The girls kept interrupting each other for some vapid explanation or another, but Simmens got the drift. Captain Shelly had lost half his forces before being pushed south by the advancing Quesh. He immediately started pulling warm bodies from the local villages to act as mage fodder. Simmens had seen reports of similar events, but Shelly had gone overboard.
The girl’s request to buy the captured deserters was a desperate bid to keep their village from dying out. Few enough villages in their area could support adding more than sixty mouths to feed, which would mean what remained of the families left decimated in the area, would have to scattered to the wind, else they end up on the streets in cities like Kern. The imperial military wasn’t normally in the habit of selling their deserters to villages looking for breeding stock…such things might set a bad precedent. Still…
“We have some money.” Lis said, pulling out a small purse filled with mostly silver and a few gold coins. The girl showed it to the lieutenant, causing him to frown.
“That’s a lot of money to be carrying around with you.” Lieutenant Simmens said considering.
He looked at the girl’s faces for several moments, before he stood up. “Give me a few minutes.” He said, walking out of his office, and closing the door behind him.
Moving over to the pile of recent file submissions, he started sifting through the files of the deserters they were selling. Pulling a pile to the side, he started sifting those records, discarding a couple here or there. When he was finished, he stared at the paperwork for twenty men. The men were mostly young, the oldest was thirty five, and their health had been ensured for the sale…a common practice given they tended to be bought to work mines and heavy manual labor. Lieutenant Simmens considered the paperwork for a several more minutes, before taking it to be processed by his secretary.
Twenty minutes later, Lieutenant Simmens reentered his office to find the young women staring at him expectantly. He set some paperwork down on his desk, and took the bag of coins they had left. He quietly sorted the coins, took out about ten gold Centas worth and placed the rest back in front of the girls. “I can’t say I fully approve, but at the very least I’m sure you’ll need field labor given your losses. What else you do with these men, is your business.” He said pulling out a set of contracts. “I’ll need you to sign, to take possession of their slavery contracts. It will give you control over them.” He said looking between Lis and Abby.
Lis and Abby smiled happily at each other, before splitting the pile in two. Simmens watched quietly as they used his pen to jot their names down, causing a small ripple of light in the pen’s wake as the magic imbued in the paper took effect.
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Arthur had been an adventurer since he was twelve, joined the Imperial military when he was twenty, and served almost eight years in the increasingly insane campaign the Empire called a ‘defensive war’. He’d fought on several fronts, and climbed the ranks reaching first lieutenant before he was transferred to Red Brigade. Colonel Drake Lucien was a brutal son of a bitch. He spent his men’s lives like they were water, and slaughtered everyone that got in his way. If the colonel hadn’t been the son of a duke, Arthur imagined he would have been censured for it…not that any of that mattered now.
After the last battle at Norn Peak, Arthur had finally had enough. He’d put in three requests for a reassignment, every one of them turned down. When the Colonel had ordered them to make a frontal assault that Quesh fort, he ran. Drake had been told by his advisors to cut supply lines, and ‘starve them out’. The fort was cut off by the navy, which gave the same advice…but Drake Lucien wanted the glory of the capture, regardless of the loss of life involved…probably trying to elevate his name for an advancement; Arthur had heard that numerous territories were being allocated recently.
Arthur fled with a dozen other men, all tired of being under the command of someone who was intent on throwing their lives away. After the assault resulted in massive losses, and no actual victory, the remainder of the Colonel’s forces tracked them down within two days. According to Colonel Drake Lucien, the loss of his critical personnel prior to the assault was a key reason for its failure. Five thousand soldiers, and thirteen fleeing his insane orders was apparently the cause of its failure. What a joke.
Arthur was lucky, he supposed, he could have been executed on the spot…but the Colonel seemed to prefer the idea of him enslaved and working in a mine somewhere until he died of exhaustion, bereft of hope. When they marched him and some other deserters through Karn, a few people threw rocks at them, and berated them as cowards. Arthur didn’t care anymore, the whole empire and everyone in it could burn for all he gave a damn.
Before they had even branded him, the entire block of twenty men was pulled back to the adjunct office near the slavers pens, and handed off to two young women, and told they were being sold for field labor. The women couldn’t have been out of their teens, and though attractive, kept leering gleefully at them. If the military had sold them all for field slave labor, Arthur was betting it was going to be arduous, and possible dangerous. The girls were wearing worn cotton dresses, with a lot of road dust around the edges. If he had to guess, that meant they had travelled in from out of the city…and probably a ways. They were headed north, which meant an outlying village or farming community, since all the farms around Karn tended to be to the south and east.
The blonde one, named Lis, bought a couple of rough looking wagons and horses, and loaded one up with supplies, and the other up with the men. The brunette, Abby, said she was going to send word. Arthur and the other men mostly kept quiet, like they’d been told. The ‘contracts’ they had been bound to created compulsions to obey the orders of their owners. Some contracts weren’t so severe, only requiring certain actions or behaviors, but Arthur and the rest were slaves now.
After telling them to sit in the carriage and wait quietly, Abby went up to them and started talking ‘at’ them. When they didn’t respond at all, she seemed to get upset and wandered off in a huff…they couldn’t have responded if they’d wanted to. They had been told to wait quietly, and without some other order, had to do just that.
It took them four days of hard riding, and crap for rations, before they arrived at what looked like a small village. Lis had run ahead on a horse that looked like it should have been put down by now. They waited for an hour on the edge of the village before being marched in, only to find more than sixty young women wandering out dressed in what passed for their ‘best’, with smiles on their faces. The men just looked between each other confused.
“All Right! Before we pare you off to households, it’s been decided that we’re going to have a dance!” Lis said coming back with a smile on her face.
Abby started clapping with excitement, “Let’s use the old chateau! It’s been empty for years, and we could have a wonderful ball.” She said looking back at the slave men, before she bolted for one of the small thatch houses, to get dressed.
Lis watched Abby go and shrugged, “Actually, that sounds like a great idea. Um…all of you should go wash up…I’ll see if we can get you something to wear.” She said and ran off herself, leaving them standing in the middle of the road, being leered at by a town full of women.
“Um…Lieutenant, what’s going on here?” one of the men who fled with Arthur asked confused.
“I have no idea.” Arthur responded, shaking his head as he headed for a nearby water hole to ‘wash up’.