Book One – Chapter 15

Politics. War. These things had never meant anything to Yu. Nothing beyond the estate walls ever had, really. How could you not get tired of all that fighting? Was there not always some war happening somewhere? The dwarves alone seemed to spark a new Heritage War every century. Really, just how many mountains and mines could they claim heritage to before the world ran out of places for them to be expelled from? After centuries upon centuries of getting their asses beaten by wizards, it was about time they gave it a rest. Sorry, not sorry.
 

Even in the deepening darkness foretelling the Witching Hour, Yu could feel Fallem’s gaze boring into him. He met it with defiance, as though sheer force of will might push the wizard’s scrutiny away. Whatever Fallem wanted to imply, Yu owed nothing to the world. Why should he be a wandering lexicon of everyone who one time or another shaped places he would never see and would never ever want to see?

Yu simply did not want to be bothered with shit like this. That was supposed to be the whole damn point of the Barnstream settlements: find a shitty place in the shittiest part of the shittiest country and accept all its shitty living conditions. If you lived in the most unremarkably awful place, with conditions so abysmal they served as their own defence, no one would bother to fight you over it. The Barnstream settlements had been a haven for cowards, deserters, and peace-seekers too beaten down to ask for more. For decades, there had been no ambition beyond survival, no expectation of comfort. And yet, or rather, exactly because of that, it worked — or it had, once.

According to Tria, it had worked well, for all the time between the implementation of the Human Restrict Act until two decades ago, when the bormen had appeared. Because even loser peoples, when working together for generations, eventually turn a shitty place into a less shitty place.

“Give them generations,” she had said, “and even a cesspit becomes tolerable. And once that happens, the vermin come crawling in. Cadgers, opportunists, parasites.

First, the place makes the people. Then the people make the place. And eventually, you witness those arriving that want the place but not the people. That is when the inviting become the invaded.”

Something like that.