What Makes a Man Less?

An opening I’m just gonna put here. (Chapter 1)

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“Ugh”

“Where… where am I?”

Golden violet rays spilled over Miguel’s blurry vision as he groggily opened his eyelids.

He turned his head, trying to make sense of where he was only for a sharp ache to hit the back of his head, blurring out his vision even more.

Everything felt… heavy, sore, and wet.

Wondering why his not-so-soft hay bed felt more uncomfortable than it normally did, he turned, placed his hands on the dewy ground and shakily pushed his body up.

His vision gradually gained focus as he stood… and paused, taking in the view in front of him.

The gargantuan walls. The wooden sword. The slums, filled with smoke and ash….

“Argh!”

A sharp pain assaulted his mind as memories of the previous day’s events flashed through his mind

The promise. The injustice. Those greedy bastards. The fire…

“Damn it!”

Miguel kicked one of the auspicious pieces of rubble that lay at his feet and held his head.

“Damn them. Damn their parents if they didn’t teach them well. Damn them more if those good-for-nothings were taught basic human decency yet refused to listen.”

Miguel VIII Yvain was but a young squire when he was first asked to battle a dragon with nothing but a wooden sword.

He lived his whole life in a small empire named Credence, popularly known as The City of Gold.

To the outside world it was an advanced nation at the forefront of technology, with its iconic great wall that was rumored to have been made of mostly gold, and its aesthetic infrastructure…

If only they knew we were living on borrowed time.

You see, the nobles had been recklessly borrowing money from their guardian dragon, Aurex, The Golden One.

With it they made this nation into what it was today with the labor of the people, barely kept alive with mortgaged houses outside the walls and minimum wage that was as unstable as a newborn’s bowel.

Eventually, payment day never came. So Aurex came to us, which — to him — was the greatest insult to both him and the nation.

Miguel remembered being ordered by the nobles to confront the dragon with the army, basically they were used as cannon fodder to delay that overgrown lizard with wings.

The most frustrating thing is that they didn’t even value him enough to give an iron sword.

Miguel bent and rolled over some pieces of rubble to find his broken damp sword.

Picking it up he stared into the horizon, towards the direction of the closest nation to Credence.

In the end, the dragon made the truth come to light, but by then there was no one left to be held accountable.

No one but us.

So, he reduced everything to rubble.

All the people could do is watch as years of their sweat and tears were reduced to nothing but ash and smoke.

Miguel let out a long breath of air, then he straightened and began walking forward.

“To Atlantis then, after all, that’s all I can do.”

Hello 👋 Mudane here. I’ve been thinking about what trajectory I want my writing here to follow, and it’s coming to me, but it’ll take some time. In the meantime I just wanted to post something.

A friend inspired me to write this opening chapter, I was thinking about the great depression while writing it.

It has a little of my perspective about debts there too. Hope you liked it at least.

I should continue this too, shouldn’t I?

See you soon.

I’ll be posting this on Royal Road

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