One could say that the evening was beautiful in the mountain valley village. The sky had turned from evening pink to blood red while the sun was still simmering behind the mountain.

Darius, a skinny black-haired boy, had been gathering firewood. Finally, he had been trusted not only to go pick wood, but he had been given an old axe. The axe hilt had, of course, broken in the forest, and Darius wondered if it was a good idea to go back home.

*How can it even be, this rotten hilt.* Thought Darius while kicking rocks on the slow way home.

Rocky village had its customs, and leniency for children was not among them. On an average day, people would have walked back to the village but somehow, near the village, nobody could be seen. Darius hunched his shoulders and continued dragging the hefty woodpile behind him. He had learned to gather piles of wood halfway to the village and, at the end of the day, gather bigger bundles to carry as much back home.

He was proud of it. As for twelve-year-old boys, the wood haul was almost as much as adults would carry back. “*Why work hard when you can work smarter.*” His thoughts returned to the axe, and he felt the usual alienation from other village folks again.

Darius felt older anger that had very little to do with the personal differences in the village or even with beatings at home. All of this could have been justified. But he did not understand why he was laughed at when he tried to leave for a school outside the village. He gathered frustrating memory of being denied one of the most essential things, knowledge. First, he had been praised for learning to read very quickly and remember what he read. He even learned some mathematics until old Grant could not teach him anymore. When he asked did negative numbers exist, old Grant was frustrated and forced him out of the class. Darius shouted, "you can keep your smelly barn" while he rubbed his hurting face.

A sudden jolt of pain in his foot woke Darius from his murky thoughts about the village and potential beating at home. He sat on the woodpile and took his other boot off his leg. While leaning and pouring little rocks from the boot, Darius thought about when he would get new boots.

It had been a year and a half since his family had gotten these boots from a travelling merchant. Last year had been difficult for poor families, and most of the local trade had been made by exchanging products without money. Only the local emperor's guards had money to buy anything. Otherwise, everyone else had to save money for taxes, merchants and a healer.

The emperor’s guards were mismanaged punch of self-important local folk that had been lifted from poverty to less poverty with the expense of losing the rest of the dignity that they might have possessed. The guards' captain was a well-known lazy drunkard who had not hit any rabbit with his bow since he was appointed to the village.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Darius hated the guards above all. Sometimes they stole things from him for gate toll or otherwise harassed people.

They were the necessary evil against occasional monsters lurking in deeper parts of the forest but evil, nonetheless.

In addition to guards, the village was separated from the forest by a large canyon. The great thing was that a local healer, Forest witch, had built a large bridge with earth magic so that people could earn a living. Less enticing detail about it was that the healer also taxed three copper coins each month for each person who went to the forest, covering nearly everybody in the village. Nobody dared avoid paying since not paying would end up in an unfortunate fall to the bottom of the deep canyon.

The people feared forest witch. Even guards had to pay her for the occasional healing of wounds. Once they didn't pay, the witch decapitated the captain of the guard and threw his body into the canyon. Even the old captain's skull was still hanging on the wall of the witch’s house.

*The new drunkard captain of the guard did all manner of things wrong, but he was just smart enough not to piss off Forest witch.*, thought Darius. Albeit Darius knew that he had barely been able to survive alive from sneaking into the witch’s house and reading some of her books. That guilty pleasure of stealing real knowledge, anything that could get rid of the feeling of being in a cage while living in the village without a chance to leave.

Darius eventually neared the dreadful house of the witch. The day had been pretty bad already, and all bad memories plagued his mind. He took careful half steps towards the whitewashed house that cast a shadow on the bridge.

Forest witch had built a house on the forest side of the canyon, claiming the right for the forest to live in peace from the village people. Everyone hated the tall place nearly as much as they despised witch, but it was always forgotten when someone needed healing. Witch was the judge of life and death in the village. If you could not afford healing, you were shit out of luck. She was also the only person in the village who did not need to pay emperor’s taxes because mages of the Leiden Empire were exempted from paying taxes. Even very early in life, Darius faced the reality that magic ruled the empire, even in the home village.

Grandmother Aisla, whom Darius never got to meet, had died because she could not receive help from the Forest witch—poisoned by a snake without enough money to save herself. Darius and his family did not dare to say or do anything to the forest witch. It didn’t stop Darius from spotting the wall of the house every time he walked past after carefully seeing that nobody was watching.

As Darius neared the house of the Forest witch, he tried to see if the witch would have been at home. There could be another chance to get into the house. Before Darius touched the black doorknob of witch’s house, he noticed the state of the village down below. Large parts of the village were on fire. Dark smoke flew in the air from multiple parts of the village, and the petrifying smell of burning tar and the abundant stench of blood carried over with the warm evening wind.