Ashes and Kingdoms

A chapter

One nation has perished.

There's a date when I can assure you, but people just accidentally realized it. Something big that was protecting us, that it disappeared.

The first signs were revealed on the northern border.

Outside towns and villages, along the border where forests and marshes loom at the end of cultivated and grazing land, pompous and bonfire platforms are placed. Legion soldiers patrol before sundown, to light the holy fire blessed by the priest, to protect the Dark Families from encroaching upon man's realm.

The number of flames began to decrease slightly.

Only a few places at first. Next one in three disappeared and the night increased in depth.

Still, if the Dark Families didn't attack, the bonfire was dwindling and finally even the patrol of the Legion soldiers was gone.

Because I can no longer get my salary.

I can't cover my fuel every night because I can't get money or supplies from my home country. On the contrary, even the lives of soldiers and priests will suffer, and they will run to gold measures to paste their mouths.

A small barracks crumbled first.

Discipline among soldiers was disturbed, followed by escape and neglect. Soldiers struggling to keep order were killed, and eventually barracks everywhere turned into outlaw nests. Even if you like it that way, the national army, once directed at repression, never showed up.

Months passed without the sound of military shoes going down the street or even the rumors of it being heard.

- Eventually, secretly, the darkness began to move.

One bonfire and another went out, and those who had been lurking long behind the mists of the deep woods and marshes twitched and encroached upon the world of men with the night and darkness. Quietly cautious at first, eventually bold, merciless.

Destroying the fields and threatening their lives, the peasants inevitably flow into the walled city. An army of bandits by the ex-soldiers turns the unaccompanied into slaves instead of driving away their dark families.

Thus, a year and not long after that, the prints of the flourishing Diatius Empire were to be worn with holes in which the barren wilderness could not be seen. The settlements were isolated, laws made on their own in each town came to pass, no culture or art was seen, and people sold their wealth to survive, their neighbors, their self-esteem, even their families.

Nanais, a bustling harbour town facing the shining Divara Sea, in the imperial northwestern province of Vitia, also could not escape the same fate.