My mother liked to say, “Work in a way that is useful to your people.”
My father liked to say, “Be a man who defends the weak.”
I lost my parents to an epidemic when I was only ten years old, and in the twenty-five years since, I have done my utmost to live by their words.
As a youth, I banded together with other orphans who, like me, had lost their parents, and together we saved up by cleaning around the city, helping at the farms for a little food, and sometimes hunting monsters whenever they appeared. That was how we survived day to day, living on the money we earned from our work.
Five years passed that way. The year I turned fifteen, however, war broke out between a neighboring nation and our own, and our country saw defeat after defeat. Our forces lost battle upon battle, until enemy soldiers pushed as far as the city I called home...and began to plunder it before my very eyes.
I couldn’t stand by and watch as these atrocities played out. So to make good on the words that my parents had left me, I decided to fight to protect the city from the invaders. I enlisted in the military, and I fought, on and on, for twenty years.
In the winter of the year that I turned thirty-five, negotiations with our foes fell in our favor, and the war was declared over. Then all of a sudden, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, people were hailing me as the heroic savior of our nation.
As it turned out, without my ever realizing it, I had an aptitude for combat. I had done more in battle than any other soldier across the country. In fact, even the nation’s advantageous negotiations to end the war had been a result of my efforts.
Thus began the confusing and awkward days in which everyone I met praised me endlessly. The people who fought alongside me, the knights who led our forces, the people in the city who always hated us orphans, and even the nation’s most powerful people, who apparently did very important work—all of them heaped praise upon me.
I was applauded and cheered everywhere I went. It went on so long that in the end even the king himself, the most important person in the entire nation, joined in and commended me. Using some very difficult and complicated words, he said some very nice things about me, and announced that he would reward me with a domain.
I didn’t actually know what it meant to have a domain, uneducated as I was, but the official at his side politely explained that, in essence, it meant living on the land I was given as its lord, protecting its people, gathering their money, and giving that to the king.
And apparently, once you were bestowed a domain, you were expected to go there immediately. I was somewhat forcefully ushered into a carriage, and without any chance to prepare for the journey, we left the capital.
I traveled for a month under the watchful eye of officials who clearly thought very little of me, if anything at all. I wasn’t allowed out of the carriage except to go to the bathroom or to sleep. It was a suffocating several weeks that suddenly ended one afternoon when I was told that we had finally reached our destination.
There was a lot of bickering and complaining from the officials as I was pushed out of the carriage and took the first steps in my new domain. I stood in what I was told was the center of it, and one of the officials explained that everything as far as the eye could see was mine.
The official pointed at neat grassy plains ahead of us, then gestured around at...more of the same thing. No matter where I looked, I saw the wide grassy plains, sweeping grassy plains, and expansive grassy plains that were my domain.
It was a far cry from anything I had imagined when I had been told that I would receive land. It was so different from what I expected that I could do nothing more than dumbly stare at it all. The official gazed at me with a wicked smile as he spoke.
“I must say, it’s a fitting fiefdom for an orphan joining the ranks of the upper class. Give the job your best. These plains are called Nezrose. Your name is Dias, yes? Well, henceforth, you shall be known as Dias Nezrose.”
With that said, he hopped back into the carriage and left me all alone...standing in the middle of grassy plains that stretched farther the longer I looked.
I saw no sign of any of the subjects that I had been told about. To make matters worse, there was no house for me to live in either. When I realized that I still hadn’t eaten, it dawned on me that I would also have to consider what to do about food, and though I took another look around, I saw nothing edible.
The only things I had been able to bring with me were my beloved double-sided battle-ax, the clothes on my back, my worn-out boots, and my battle-worn armor.
I didn’t have a single thing to eat.
This was how life in my domain of endless grassy plains began—with no subjects, no house, and no food.