Aria, Lasp, and Nyal waved goodbye to the human knights after a few more minutes of talking, not wishing to hold them from their duty any longer than they already were. For all Nyal was not aware of, she knew what their job was very clearly. All knights in the kingdom reported to the five dukes and five duchesses that kept law in each province of Reine. They assigned duties for patrol, bodyguards for the trade of materials, and managed military resources such as medicine, armor, weapons, feed for horses, and anything else considered necessary for the upkeep of not just the law, but the Reine army.

Those dukes and duchess, in turn, all answered to one man: King Sullivan Barborasa. Ruler of Reine, writer of all its laws and from all she heard, an upright man. She had personally never seen the king, but her parents Nyal believed that he was looked upon highly by his people, given the high spirits they were always in. There were supposedly worries that he hadn’t yet obtained an heir, for while he had a child she was a woman, and for some reason no women had held power in just under a century.

Nyal didn’t quite get it, as did her parents for the matter. While she had never seen Ekra Eshan, she had learned through the means of a special book how it was governed. Whereas Reine was ruled by one man, her homeland was ruled by a council. Each town and city had a representative chosen by its people. These people, Harpen or not, were then made members of the Grand Council of Ekra Eshan for the next three years. From there, the law and bills and other things she didn’t remember were taken care of.

She could always remind herself again by looking into her special book. It had been with her all her life, and she had never been bored by it. Where other books only had so much within its pages, hers never did. Within its contents were thousands upon thousands of stories that the book revealed to her and her alone. The book deemed all but her unfit to open it, something Nyal didn’t understand quite well. After all, it couldn’t be that hard to open any book, no matter how special they were.

After a short walk past where they had talked to the knight, the Harpen family arrived at their home: a set of tents with a wagon and horse behind it. Typically, their kind would not need most of it, as they travel by air and are able to make it to a town far quicker because of it. As Nyal couldn’t yet fly, they were forced to travel by foot instead. It didn’t help that her feather growth had been usually slow for her kind, making it so neither truly knew when she would take to the skies.

“Nyal, your mother and I are gonna start working on dinner,” Lasp told his daughter. “You know the rules.”

“Don’t worry, have no plan on running off,” Nyal told them before running off towards the smaller of the two tents. She knew those words were more reminders than anything; she would never run away when her special book was so close.

“For all the energy in that girl, she really can’t pull her head out of that book,” Aria said. She turned to her husband and smiled. “She gets it from you, you know. If she learns how to read Acamese, she is going to take your collection hostage.”

“I sure hope so. I got them with the hopes she one day would,” Lasp explained, a silent chuckle in his throat as he spoke. “Though we both know that those books won’t keep her attention as long as she has that in her position.”

Nyal tuned out her mother and father's conversation at that point. Walking into the tent, her eyes immediately fell on her special book, laying wide up on the ground just as she had left it. It had a clasp on one side which opened as soon as she touched it, and would suddenly shut itself if anyone but her dared to peek inside. Her parents had discovered that years ago, and claimed that under no circumstances was she to ever bring it outside of camp.

It seemed like a strange thing to ask considering none but her could open it, but she never questioned it. Her parents usually had good reasons for rules as specific as that.

She sat down, staring at what was currently a blank page. Nyal placed her left wing on the blank page, and sudden lines upon lines of words showed themselves to her. They were a jumbled mess, the book not sure yet what its owner wanted to be shown. Not once did the harpen question the book’s strange nature, for never in her eleven years since hatching did it ever try to harm her.

“Share with me a story of home, of Ekra Eshan,” She asked the book.

For a second the words stayed jumbled, but soon the ink started to rearrange itself. Some ink faded away while more was added elsewhere, Harparicletter after Harparic letter appearing before her eyes. Quickly, she realized that she had read this story once before, nearly two years ago. It was a story not just of Ekra Eshan, but of Rag’na’rog itself. The book started off the story with the same four words it always did.

"Of course, young lady."

She always wondered why it addressed her so formally, but that curiosity never stayed for more than a few seconds. Quickly, her eyes peeled away from those words and onto the rest. She brought her wing back to her side, so she could see all the book had decided to share with her. Then, Nyal started reading.

The Harpen homeland of Ekra Eshan, lying on Rag’na’rogs head, was once home to more. Man, who exists all across the Great Oracle’s body, had also once had a home there. They existed alongside the Numaran Individuals with fur and claws, built to live within the higher reaches of the mountains. For many centuries it stayed like this, until the first Harpens landed on its shore.

Led by Gerrik Valist Solvar, Harpen soon crossed the Scorched Ocean and landed upon lands they would call Ekra Eshan. Human and Numar greeted them openly, but Gerrik and his people had not come under the belief of peace. No, they had come from a land that humans had taken for their own and had made slaves out of their people. When he found humans upon the land he wished to make his people’s new home, peace was never considered.

Nyal looked away and took a deep breath. She knew what was coming, and that the book would spare no detail in its retelling. Even if she didn’t know if every story the book told her was real, this one most surely was. For a moment, she considered asking the book to tell a more pleasant story, but she was stronger than that. With heart and mind steeled, she looked back and read forth.

The Harpen people, despite having brought so little with them in their journey across the ocean, were ruthless. Having seen so many hurt of their own hurt by humans, they killed or enslaved village after village. The humans, having never seen Harpen before, were overwhelmed and left without an idea of how to defend themselves from the invaders. The Numaran were spared just as little love when they came to the aid of mankind, and were given similar treatment. Gerrik would come to coin the slur “beastmen” during this period, one still used today.

The Harpen killed or enslaved all in the snowy land once known as Numar till there was none left free in its peaks but them… Those who were able to escape found refuge in the land southeast, a desert that became known as New Numar. With the harpen now claiming the mountains as their home, the name was changed to Ekra Eshan, and the harpen went about subjecting mankind to the same hatred that they had been treated with.

It took till five centuries later for humans and harpen to stand side by side, and mankind was slowly given freedom back as centuries passed. The harpen people felt ashamed of their actions, Gerrik no longer seeming like a hero but a madman. In those centuries man was enslaved, many escaped southward to the lands known as Reine and Acamus. In a show of forgiveness and peace, the Harpen welcomed the nations of New Numar, Acamus, and Reine to sign a pact between them. Only Reine did so, Acamus and New Numar being overtaken by the same hatred that the harpen once did.

Let this story be a reminder, young Nyal Mols Mors, of the endless cycle of repeating the past. Reine and Ekra Eshan sought to end it, but they alone could not stop it. Do not get caught up in the pain of the past, and strive for that which is more than I am.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The book’s stories had held that last sentence many times before. Never did she question its inclusion, however, for she knew what was written in it was true. While she was not aware of the war, she was more than aware of the hatred that brewed between the four nations. It was why her parents refused to go near the western border into Acamus, and was the reason she had never seen her homeland in her entire life.

Yet it went deeper than that, for repetition was the very nature of the land known as Rag’na’rog. The nature of the planet they called home was no secret, for it was no planet at all. It was the corpse of a beast, a Great Oracle. A being of such incredible power that legends say the beast once ate stars. All that was known was that a being somehow more powerful than it had created a wound across its body, creating the Scorched Ocean, and killed it. From their life was born from its corpse, and its three children, the Oracles of life, death, and balance, watched over the land.

Most of it was myth and legend, but one truth was at the center of it all: she was not the first Nyal to have existed. No one on Rag’na’rog was the first to bear their name, for when the planet became unlivable, it was the duty of its children to set all life that inhabited her body to stage one. From there, all began again, and if religious texts were to be believed every soul on Rag’na’rog had been reused time and time again. Hence, why the world was calendared by cycles, though how priests knew how there had been so many before her own eluded her.

“Is it all even true? Can it all really be believed?” Nyal muttered to herself for not the first time. It was a question whose answer eluded her, much like it did everyone else.

“Ah, evening, my feathered friends!”

Nyal’s attention was drawn away from her book and to outside the tent as she heard the sound of Acamese. Closing her special book, she moved to the entrance of her tent and opened the flap a bit to peer outside. What she saw was a human who had stopped to greet her parents at the side of the road, sickly thin tan skin with hair down to his shoulders. A pleasant, welcoming expression was on his face, his right hand holding a featureless white mask to his chest. She had seen performers wear such things before, but typically they were far more intricate than what he held.

“First knights, and now fellow travelers. I had not expected to see so many today during my travels,” The man said. While Nyal did not understand most of his words, his melancholy tone drew her in. “It seems the Oracles have blessed me with company, not something I tend to have. You would not by chance be making your way to Makaus, would you?”

“We are. You are happening to travel there too?” Her mother replied.

Nyal walked out of the tent as the man nodded, her entrance not going unnoticed as he turned to face her. She stood frozen for a second at his sudden attention, and took a step backwards. Aria and Lasp turned to their daughter, the smile on their face telling her the man was not to be feared, and she relaxed a bit. Realizing his stare had upset the child, he turned his attention back to her parents.

“Mom, dad, who is this?” Nyal asked, looking back and forth between the man and her parents.

“Oh, just a traveler like us,” Aria said to her, she then looked at the man. “What is your name sir?”

“Oh, I never did introduce myself, did I?” The man said, before bowing to the family politely. Nyal noticed there were a few books in his travel pack. An avid reader it seemed, much like his father and herself, and also likely not from Reine, given he could read in the first place. “Klaus Veltstrum, a traveler from across the border. My travels have taken me here to meet someone who I’ve been told is the key to my problems, but the faire was brought to my attention by some wonderful knights earlier today and I couldn’t miss it.”

“The same wonderful trap my wife and I walked into then,” Lasp replied. Nyal looked to the ground, saddened at the fact she couldn’t hear any of the conversation. “Rather friendly for someone from Acamus. Not many from your homeland treat us lovely.”

The word “Acamus'' caught her attention, though. She was right then, the man was not of Reine descent, or at least had been in Acamus long enough to learn how to read. While there were those among the peasantry in Reine who could read, it was far rarer than it was in Acamus or her homeland. That and his clothes did not have the simplistic look of most of Reine’s common birth, unless he was a merchant's son or entertainer like she believed. They were treated far more highly than farmers, lumberjacks, and the like.

She knew from her mother and father though that the latter would not be the case now; Acamus didn't birth entertainers.

“I can definitely understand the surprise,” Klaus told her father, sitting down. “The Endless War has certainly painted us all as Harpen hating genociders, hasn’t it? Not that I could say it isn’t entirely wrong,” His tone shifted to be more grim as a frown took the place of the smile on his face. “Yet the death one sees in a lifetime living as close to the action as I did, seeing the war’s devastation first hand, I came to realize that hate was wrong. If anything, we became much like what you once were.”

There was something about the way Klaus spoke that immediately took Nyal, even if she couldn’t understand him. His words held the drama of a performer, yet at the same time more real than any actor she had seen. Even as his words grew heavy, the emphasis on each and every word, and the motion of his body, drew her in. It got to the point that she started trying to copy his movements.

Klaus instantly took notice of this, a soft smile returning due to it and a chuckle resonating from his lips. Said chuckle caused Nyal to freeze, realizing that he wasn’t the only one who had been watching her attempts to mimic him. She looked away in embarrassment, her face hiding behind her wings. It only made the human she had been mimicking chuckle more. The joy and innocence of the world’s youth truly was something to protect.

“Sir Klaus, the day is drawing to an end. Care to join us tonight?” Her mother asked the man.

“As long as I’m not intruding too heavily on your family,” He replied with a nod, slinging his pack around to his front and putting the mask he was carrying inside. “As wonderful as company is on one's travels, you need not force yourself to do this. I’m more than comfortable to be on my merry way and leave you to your devices.”

“It is more than fine, Klaus,” Lasp said. He turned to Nyal. “Nyal, Sir Klaus here will be joining us tonight. Would yet fetch him a cushion from the wagon.”

She nodded, excitement bubbling over at the knowledge of getting to listen to the man a bit. Perhaps she could pick up a few Acamese words to use in the future, and even if she didn't, his way of talking made him remarkable to listen to. Perhaps it was how all Acamians spoke, but she didn’t have enough experience with those across the border to know.

“Of course, I’ll be right back!” She said before running off towards the wagon.

“You truly don’t have to,” Klaus told Lasp and Aria.

“We could also use the company,” Aria explained. “It had been long since we received the honor of feeding someone outside out family. What better than a fellow individual in a land not their own?”

“Can’t argue with that,” Klaus rubbed the back of his neck as he spoke. “Oh, you used the wrong form of “had” there by the way.”

Aria’s eyes widened for a moment before letting out a giggle. “So I was. Thanks for the notice.”