Heart of iron, flesh of steel.

Mind of diamond and an unbreakable will.

-Prophecies of the Charred Tower, Yama Singura–the strongest diviner to live

I suffered in Heimo for much of my childhood. My parents died before I had a chance to know them, and I staved off starvation by begging food out of whoever was kind enough to give it to me each day.

The nice old women would give me bread and cheese-whatever they could spare on the day I asked. They always offered to give me more-they told me that their lives were worth nothing compared to the new generation. They offered to give me their inheritance, to take me into their houses.

I always refused. I don’t know what made me. It could have been a deep-seated fear that they would leave me as my parents had, and I’d be out on the streets again. I didn’t even take too much food from them in case they came upon hard times and couldn’t support themselves.

All my decisions in that time sprouted from selfishness, of course. I just wanted to live.

Heimo, at that time, was divided into three different major districts. Not officially, of course, but everyone could see the divisions. Everyone knew of them. There were names for each district, different based on who you were speaking to. The nobles’ district was called the Golden Rows. It was the northernmost one, at the top of the city right before the mountains jutted out of the ground. The mountains prevented further expansion of the noble district, probably a ploy engineered long before so that no one new could join the city’s elites. If there was the slightest problem, the soldiers would go running for the nobles, serving their every whimsy. Houses there were built in ancient times by Gifted Priests, strong and sturdy enough they’d never fall. The nobles’ income was more than enough to feed the entire city for the foreseeable future. There was even a study, I learned later, that just the food the nobles threw away was enough to feed the rest of the city.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I always hated the nobles. They would strut around in the market districts and main roads-the only places I’d ever see them, because they wouldn’t be caught dead in the slums-and terrorize everyone else. If people annoyed them enough, or didn’t follow their every order, they would be killed. I’d seen it happen many times. A shopkeeper offers a price a noble doesn’t feel is fair. The noble calls the soldiers, tells them to kill the shopkeeper due to ‘price gouging’. They’d kill the shopkeeper and leave while the noble took whatever they wanted from the stall. Once, I tried to help a shopkeeper’s bereaved family after the noble took their shop.

They’d lost their ability to make money, their everything. I gave them a bit of food, told them they had to start begging or stealing.

I had to watch them waste away. The two daughters became gaunt and pale, and died. I simply didn’t get enough food to feed all three of us, no matter how much we limited our rations. And they… were used to bigger meals than I could come by. The mother… she was, perhaps, the worst of them. The daughters begged, they tried to continue living. She stayed in her room, weeping pathetically until she starved.

After that, I never tried to help anyone again.

South of the Golden Rows, you’d find the Gardens, where the middle-class lived. The nobles spent a lot of money keeping the middle-class happy, fearing an uprising. Grass and trees and flowers were everywhere, the green carpet even flowing up houses sometimes. The middle-class were better than the nobles. I’d regularly go to some of their houses to beg, and they’d give me food. Not all of them, however. Many refused to accept the way the world worked, pretending the Gifted didn’t exist, or that I wasn’t starving directly in front of them, asking for food.

Past the Gardens, there was the hole I lived in. The only name people gave to it was the Black Hole, and that’s certainly what it felt like. It was the district that expanded the fastest. No one left the Black Hole once they’d entered it.