Humiliation

Fallen Kingdom The people of Pythria were a cultured people. They were, in their own words, an ‘advanced civilization,’ or so they liked to believe. Their upper classes lived like gods and goddesses. The ‘lesser’ folk, though, those not born of the right family or of noble blood, followed a very different path of existence. Theirs was a world of starvation with only one glimmer of hope; the Arena. There, in the Games, a man or woman might make their luck through tooth and claw, shield and sword. There, fighting for the amusement of the ‘cultured’ masses, a gladiator could at least win enough glory and the prizes that came with it to feed their loved ones. Like a buildup of magma underneath the earth, though, the pressure of such an unequal society continued to …

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FALLEN KINGDOM – PART 6 General Carpathiel surveyed the long columns of legionnaires and the pack train winding its way through the mountain pass at Skelne. He was no longer a young man, to put it lightly. His days of campaigning should have been long behind him. Yet the balding general, his head rimmed with fine white hair, now brooded while watching his Imperium soldiers as they worked their way southward – in more or less perfect formation – moving like a single, glittering creature. Their spearpoints gleamed in rows unending. Meanwhile, were a person to simply listen to the birds or glance toward the carefree, sunshine-laden sky above, they could be forgiven for thinking that all was right in the world. It wasn’t. A revolt of gladiators and Xokothi slaves in the south had …

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