The Empire of Agni
Manussa - a small town near the border of Baradin-Assan
2345th Year, 11th Moon, 16th Day (Twenty years ago)
The last lingering traces of the perfumed palace air lingering on 21-year-old Prince Vidhura's tunics had dissolved into the arid desert by the time his chariot pulled to a halt near an open field, hovering three heads above the ground through its auros propulsion engines. Though it was still midday, the fine dust that hung in the air splashed a thin and sickly ochre hue over the land around. Standing beside Prince Vidhura was his faithful retainer and charioteer, Captain Channa; a stout and muscular woman of forty, dressed in the deep blue tunic of the Inner Palace Guard, her greying hair tied into a tight bun and moisturised with a conservative amount of pomade.
Just outside of the town, there was a large open field, where sparse sprigs of pale yellow grass valiantly clawed their way out of the dry soil. From where his chariot hovered, the young Prince could see a small procession of ten or so people emerge from behind the town’s cracked brick walls. At the head of the procession was a pair of guards dressed in leather armour; they were dragging out a wiry old man of seventy or so years, whose resistance was far more pathetic than it was effective. At the back, following the procession, were a pair of young women who were wailing loudly.
“What is going on?” Vidhura turned to Channa, his stomach churning nervously. He had some inkling of a feeling of what was to come, a deep and dark sense of dread that crept up his chest from the inside. “What are they doing to him?”
Channa pursed her lips and folded her arms. Her stony and inscrutable face, hardened by years of servitude in the Imperial Palace’s guards, betrayed just the faintest hint of sorrow, somewhere in her twinkling black eyes.
“You can’t do this to Grandpa!!”
The two young women were weeping and wailing incessantly. The older of the two - roughly the same age as himself, Vidhura noted - dashed forward and tried to claw at the tunic of the soldiers, but was promptly held back by one of the others in the procession.
“Stop it! Both of you!” Another person in the procession, another old man, slapped the older woman across the face with the back of his hand. “With his sacrifice, Manussa will have enough auros for the next year. Or would you rather the Assanite bastards slaughter us all, because we have no more gunpowder!?”
The old grandfather was promptly forced to his knees by the two guards. He cast one final twinkling glance back at his two granddaughters, choking back his own tears.
“Tell them to stop!” Prince Vidhura yelled at Channa. He had realised what was going on. “They can’t do this!”
“No, Your Highness.” Channa shook her head. “That is one order I cannot obey.”
“They’re going to kill him!” Prince Vidhura protested tearfully. “I can’t allow this!”
“You agreed”, Channa replied solemnly. “If I take you out of the palace, you would not interfere with anything. You will interact with nobody.”
"How was I to know that this would happen outside?"
"You promised me, Vidhura. You promised your father, and your wife."
“How can you just let him die?!”
“I cannot do as you wish!!”
Prince Vidhura turned away from Channa. A single fiery tear fell from his eye and shattered against the back of his trembling hand as he gritted his teeth and gripped the side of the chariot tightly.
Beneath him, the old grandfather lay motionless on the ground. The two women screamed in anguish as the two soldiers prostrated themselves on either side of the old grandfather’s body, one on the east and another on the west, their foreheads touching the ground. A third person - an old woman in pure white robes - stood to the north of the old grandfather’s body, clutching in her hands a large jar, around which was coiled a long beaded necklace with a purple tassel that dangled and brushed against the dirt. Under their breaths, the three of them began chanting a mantra over and over again as the rest of the procession watched from a safe distance.
Then, before his eyes, Vidhura saw the body of the old grandfather slowly dissolve into dust. As it did so, a pale blue liquid squirted forth from the earth, which the woman in the white robe quickly began to collect in the large jar, taking care not to waste a single drop.
“That is auros in its raw form”, said Channa to Vidhura. “But this town has already depleted its reserves. The auros refuses to leave… unless the earth is satisfied with what it is offered.”
Prince Vidhura said nothing. Within mere minutes, the last droplets of the auros had been squeezed out of the soil, and the procession turned around and returned into the walls of the town, leaving the two women outside to clutch at the ground where their grandfather had laid just moments before.
“This is the way of the world.” Channa folded her arms and exhaled sombrely. “Manussa is a border town. The Assanites are willing to do whatever it takes to obtain auros to build up their armies.
“Unless we can somehow replace auros with something else-”
“Channa, take me home.”
Channa turned to Vidhura. He had wiped his tears away; in their place, his eyes burned in rage.
“I’ve seen enough.” All around them, a gentle breeze began to stir up; inside that breeze, there was the faintest trace of a wail, rising from the far dunes and tearing east across the barren earth. “I want to return to Vajrapura now.”
Saying nothing, Channa restarted the main auros engines of the chariot. Vidhura felt the same familiar vibrations beneath his feet that he had felt as he left the Imperial Palace in Vajrapura, but they bore a sinister overtone this time, as if the machine upon which he stood would close in and swallow him at any moment.
In the corner of his eye, he caught one last glimpse of the woman in the white robes, who had waited just outside the walls for the others in the procession to enter, before herself going in. The jar she held in her hands was barely one third full.
…
