Island of the Freymore
The Island of the Freymore were a place of isolation. A great forest spanned the vast majority of the island, massive trees hiding large, unfriendly beasts. Nature was at it’s prime, those who knew enough, or were lucky enough to have evolved enough, survived and prospered, those who couldn’t survive didn’t. It was the simple fact of life on the island. The Freymore had been isolated long enough that they had evolved in a slightly different fashion than the rest of humanity. Agility was the key to their survival, those who had been stronger hadn’t been fast enough to escape predators or the packs of large wolves. Their skin was deathly pale, and they commonly had thinner and shorter builds.
There were no cities, no villages, just a few nomadic clans of at max fifty people, and they were rare. More commonly it was single families. It was not advantageous for them to stay as large groups unless they had good hunters, and commonly just ended with more empty stomachs then it helped with. Larger groups attracted more attention from the wildlife, and it was a risk few were willing to take.
The Freymore were out of touch with the world. A lost people, who were about to realize a harsh reality; they had more to fear than those on their island. The ship that had come a century ago with guns had almost proven it to them, but they had befriended the captain of that ship, and traded furs for his fire arms. But eventually he stopped coming, the myth of a forest people lost with him and his ship during a hurricane.
They had learned how to make their own guns and ammunition, but they were expensive, and there would be few enough of them when more civilizations arrived.
There was no government, the laws handed down mercilessly with an iron fist by nature. They would have been called ‘feral’ by many, primitive by even more. There was no authority, the only law was to survive, and they had.
Would it last? Would it survive the coming struggle?
South Eastern Forest
It was raining, a steady patter striking their earth through the canopy of trees, there were distant rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning. The sound of the falling rain filled the air, along with the distant sound of crashing waves against the shore line of the island.
Natalia looked up at the darkened sky, one of her hands held against her forehead, rain striking her pale skin. Their was a smile smile on her face. She had always loved the rain. She held a black, wooden, highly ornate rifle in her left hand. There was a cloak partly covering her otherwise mostly exposed torso. She looked back down, looking at the tracks in front of her.
She had been looking for the deer for a day and a half already, a sleepless, hungry night followed by a few berries, and now she was here, prowling through the forest looking for her prey. Natalia was young, only eighteen years old by civilized age keeping, seventeen winters by her own. She had not family anymore, she alone had survived when an illness had wiped her family out. She was alone, there was no one else that could help her.
She had learned to survive. Her feet were silent as she walked, and she watched everything around her closely, her finger close the trigger in case a predator came and she didn’t have time to get up a tree, or get hidden beneath brush. She walked slowly, cursing every small sound she made and what meals she might miss out on because of them.
She didn’t know that this hunt would be one she remembered as a coming of the savage. The coming of technology, ‘order’, ‘progress’, and ‘peace.’ Order was against nature. Progress was not made in a laboratory, it was made over decades of learning on the field and evolution. Peace was a lie. All you had to do was look about.
Everything was a fight. You fought to survive against disease, you fought to for each meal, the wilderness fought for the same things.
The tracks were getting deeper. Close, she thought. She kept walking unaware of close to the coastline she was becoming. She saw her prey, the deer was unaware of her presence, eating the leaves off of bush, the buck was calm. It was completely unaware of close it was to death.
Natalia rose her rifle, moving wet hair that had plastered onto her forehead from her eye. She slowed her breathing and aimed for the heart. The buck detected her a moment too late. His head shot up as the rifle went off. The deer was still for a brief moment, then it fell to the ground.
Natalia drew a long bladed knife, and went to work getting meat from the carcass, unaware of the fact that people with unknown languages would be coming soon, that people who had more technology were coming. Blissfully unaware of the fact that her way of life was about to be tested, she smiled to herself, pleased, and began to prepare herself a meal.
