“Not everyone might view freedom as a blessing.” - Old Posuin saying.
Of all the things Alvaro had expected himself to be after a losing battle, lost and directionless wasn’t one of them.
Death or crippling injury, he had prepared himself for. As a Warforged he was trained and prepared to sell his life dearly, which was what he had expected himself to be doing in a losing battle. He was somewhat incensed that he never got that chance, having been knocked unconscious by a dead body that happened to be sent flying his way.
But such were the vagaries of life.
He, along with the other surviving Warforged – there was less than one-third of their original numbers, with most of them injured to varying degrees – were disarmed and held captive, but to his surprise, were treated kindly by their victorious opponents. They were housed in simple but proper tents, and fed properly for the two weeks after the battle, which they spent in uncertainty along with the other captive soldiers.
During those two weeks, as if the deities played a jest on him, the hostility he faced was not from his enemies who were also his captors by then, but from his own people. Instead, hostility came from the other Kolitscheian soldiers held captive, many of whom blamed the slave soldiers for their defeat, seeing their failure to hold the right flank as its cause.
The hostilities never devolved beyond harsh words or mocking stares – their captors and guards would break up any altercation between the prisoners swiftly – but it still stung Alvaro nonetheless. It was not that he disputed their failure to hold the flank, for they had indeed failed in that task. It was more that he doubted that any of the other soldiers would have been able to do a better job at all.
Sure, it was convenient to blame the Warforged for failing, but those who mocked them and decried their uselessness failed to consider how they would have fared under the same situation. Memories of that last battle brought an involuntary shudder to Alvaro, as he recalled the large bestial warrior carve their way through his compatriots.
He had ran over the scenario over and over again in his mind after he woke up, and soon came to the conclusion that all he would have been able to do in that situation was to run ahead and perish in battle, at best. Nothing he could have done would have changed the outcome of the battle as a whole.
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Fortunately, two weeks after their defeat, the old Duke returned, and he announced something that both brought relief and disappointment to Alvaro’s heart. The Duke had apparently negotiated his own freedom, along with most of the captive soldiers, who cheered at the announcement. However, that had not included the captured Warforged, who had been left in the enemy’s hand as part of the price paid for that freedom.
On the one hand, Alvaro was glad that he and his compatriots could still serve their liege one last time even after their defeat. Yet on the other hand, he and his compatriots felt lost and abandoned, derived of the purpose they trained their whole lives for in one fell swoop, and left to the tender mercies of their captors.
Which admittedly was better than what he had expected.
To his surprise, he found himself, along with the remaining Warforged brought away by their captors, alongside tens of thousands of other people. People he knew. They were all fellow slaves from Kolitschei city, somehow gathered en masse and turned into the enemy’s captives as well. A greater surprise was when he found his own family amongst them.
It was from them that he heard of the full story of how the current situation came to be. Alvaro was partly enraged, but was more sorely disappointed when he heard his old mother retell how they, along with all the other slaves in the city were driven out under the new Duke’s orders and told to “delay” the enemies with their lives, as if they were just worthless disposables.
He knew that to some, slaves like them were just property, but most people in the city had a closer, more genial relationship with those that served under them, often bordering on mutual respect. Such a move must have met with resistance, and apparently the old Duke himself was so disgusted by it that he negotiated a truce with the enemy in order to remove his own son from the position.
Not that any of those mattered any longer to Alvaro and all the other slaves with him. They had been sold off, a price paid for the freedom of their masters. The large crowd marched silently under the lead and escort of their captors, unaware of what sort of future awaited them in the foreign land, with some despairing and others lamenting their fates.
So it was with surprise and some bafflement when they halted the marching just before the army crossed the border between Kolitschei and Algenverr and a young nobleman on a horse went out to address the gathered Kolitscheian slaves.
The nobleman introduced himself as the future Duke of Algenverr, their new liege lord, but no master. He further proclaimed that while the slaves gathered before him had lived their lives as properties of others, no such thing would be allowed going forward. Algenverr does not recognize slavery, or the use of slaves other than for criminal punishment.
Instead, he invited the former Kolitscheian slaves to follow him to Algenverr, not as slaves who followed after their master’s every command and whims, but as free men and women, whose choices were their own to make. He promised that those amongst them willing to take a chance would be allocated lands in the uninhabited areas of the Duchy, land to call their own.
They would have to work hard to make usable farmland out of such lands, but the nobleman also promised three years’ worth of material support to whoever chose to undertake such an endeavor. As for others who felt disinclined about working such lands, they would be employed in other fields. Not as slaves, but as employees.
Free men and women, no longer anyone else’s property.