Valium

I’m one of the few of our people who live here in the Boarder Lands. Most moved to the Wards, the cities and towns where it’s supposedly safe. They now believe the woods to be a place of death. For most our Lands would be a place of death. The Ward dwellers have become weak and have forgotten the ways of our ancestors. They only believe what Gralsitor Mayor tells them, brainwasher of the masses.

Gralsitor Mayor, king of Valium, sits on the throne of Valium in Mainton. The honest name of Gralsitor Mayor is a secret so well guarded that each time a new king comes to power entire families are executed in order to keep it so. The first Gralsitor Mayor was a decent man whose name truly was Gralsitor Mayor. He was the one who established the Wards with its high stone wall designed to keep the flightless beasts from wreaking havoc on the farmlands. What he did not expect was for his successors to keep the people trapped within its walls. Four generations after the wall was built, all have come to believe that there is a  fate worse than death: being exiled to the Boarder Lands.

I am one of the few people who live in the Boarder Lands. At one time, I lived in Artur, a small Wall village in the Wards. Then the unthinkable happened.

It was near the end of The Bread Wars. I was twelve years old: old enough to be tried as an adult in the courts of Valium. the charge was espionage. I was a child doing as my parents had asked of me, and nothing more. I was only giving little scraps of paper with words I didn’t understand to my neighbors in exchange for other scraps of paper and anything they could give me to eat. My parents couldn’t feed me, and Valium wasn’t about to. When, at last, Gralsitor Mayor crushed those who fought against the king who was starving them, all who had anything to do with the uprising were brought before him. He showed no mercy. My fate was to be one worse than death: banishment to the Boarder Lands.

I kicked and screamed, pounding small, weak fists on the arms of my captors. I begged and Pleaded, explained and argued that what they were doing to me was wrong, unfair, and evil. Tears streamed down my face, soaked through their shirt sleeves, but they paid me no heed. My father had died in the last battle, and my mother had starved to death. I had no siblings or aunts and uncles. I was the only child of only children. Living on the streets of the Wards would have been horrible, but to the mind of a child who believed what Gralsitor Mayor had told her about the Boarder Lands, it would have been a paradise. Stories of monsters plagued my mind, tales of horror and death pounded on my heart as I dug the soles of my little boots into the asphalt road as I desperately tried to avoid the unavoidable. Eventually, one of the men taking me to my exile had enough of my fighting and crying. He picked me up, slapped me across the face hard enough to make my ears ring, and threw me over his shoulder.

This was the beginning of my life. What came before I lived here in the Boarder Lands was not life. It was simply existence. Here in the woods there is freedom. I have the rights of a human being. I have the rights of a woman. Here in the woods I have become both human and a strong woman. I was a little girl in the Wards, still a child when they considered me adult. Here in the Boarder Lands I have grown and aged, love a man and am loved by him. I have heard of God and believe in Him. I have become human by His standards, a daughter by His standards, a sister by His standards, and a woman by His standards. I have learned right from wrong, and to fight for what I believe in. And now, as we Landers go to fight against a tyrant who believes us dead, I write this, my tale, for any who should happen across it. If I die in battle or live to see the end, this is my testimony of how a fate worse than death brought me to life instead.