The First Stygian War ended without conclusion.
A political stalemate resulting from a brutal slog of war; a twenty six year long conflict defined by national betrayals, the first application of automatic weapons and heavy artillery, and a deathtoll the world wouldn't see for another hundred fifty years. The term ‘meat grinder’ was coined by the common soldier; to watch as your sisters and brothers were wholesale eviscerated by sawblades of gunfire, ripped to shreds by artillery shrapnel, and died of infections in dirty field hospitals.
No daughter or son returned home, in their stead came the traumatized husks who stared wide eyed at empty walls and screamed as their minds replayed the death and terror again and again night after night. They could never sleep on the soft beds of home, not after finding their comfort on sheets of mud soaked wood and cots of steel fiber.
And the machining companies across the Ensolian Belt and the Northern Provinces, whose monstrous contracts for bales of barbed wire had run dry at the end of the conflict, began making mattress springs instead. Thick gauge wires became the basis of hard bed toppings, their customers all too happy to cave into their perverse cravings for comfort from their nightmares of sleeping on sinking mud.
And so, in the slow erosion of the central ensolian spectrum of comfort, the Imperium very carefully adopted what was basically a padded steel sheet as standard bedding.
And these beds in Tianci were far from the standard caliber found in the Ensolian Belt. Stuffed with fluffy cotton, with pillows filled with down feathers, and a comforter of breathable wool the entire bed seemed to eat its sleeper alive.
Sophia Elise can’t sleep.
Eyes wide open, staring as the blue reflective light of Unudo slowly filters through the thin curtains of the window, trying not to imagine herself sinking into warm mud. A heat of afternoon still maintained within the room in stale air, the double paned window locked shut under orders from both their guards; how her sweat was dripping now from her back and soaking into this awful excuse for a mattress.
Sleep girl, sleep. Her internal monologue insists harshly.
I’m trying. She snarls back.
“Be a shepherd counting sheep.” Her father once gently told her as he coddled the snot faced the toddler who slipped into her parent’s bed (Sophia’s mother at that point was snoring in unconsciousness from the exhaustive daytime demands of governance). “Imagine the cute lambs, don’t skip any. Just count the sheep. A long time ago, your own forbearers did the same, you know that?”
Some central ensolian girl sits over her flock on a hillside overlooking the banks of the Amoureuse river. In times when the Capital Valley was but a few scattered city-states connected by dirt pathways — her ancestors lived here; passing through their humble lives concerning themselves with the movements of the suns and Unudo marking the passing and comings of winter and summer. Diets of stored cabbage, potatoes, eggs, and the rare side of meat; families surrounding old mud-brick fireplaces cheering and laughing at just the most simple of humors and problems; trivial compared to the demands that would’ve been asked of them four thousand years later.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The shepherd girl takes a pause, her act of counting the flock revealing an anomaly.
Pretty sure number 14 isn’t yours. We’ve seen that ear-marked sheep, and that one totally belongs to your neighbors.
The silver haired girl descends the hillside with a slight haste, half running down towards the passive creature currently grazing from the fat blades of grass growing from the soft soil. A large clump of fur branded out from its rump, the circular symbol crossed by two lines as obvious as can be this close up.
Uh oh, this one is from the Elise’s flock.
Those self-centered, arrogant fools from the western plains; if this was one of theirs then that would mean…
A mistake, this little creature must’ve gotten lost during the cycling of the grazing fields; finding a new flock from genetic programming in its dumb brain. And now, she would be the one to face the consequences of its idiocy.
The last time someone stole livestock from them, the Elise rode out from their small town with spears and archers; hunted those thieves down and crucified them on the neutral ground. After that, nobody would even dare take even a stalk of corn from their most outlying fields…
… And once they miscounted their numerous flocks of sheep they would inevitably come and search for it, and then would they do the same to her? Pierce her body and hang her like a flayed animal on a rod of wood?
Sophia’s inner monologue interrupts her, providing the actual historical context to this strange imaginary scenario. You’re pretty certain this was the first mention of your family’s name in written history. In fact, it’s the story of how one of your ancestors met their wife while looking for a lost sheep.
There’s a long contemplation at this nice, quite wholesome story dredged from Imperial History.
We’re not even close to tired doing this exercise.
Sophia Elise can’t sleep.
She quickly stands from the bed, feeling as a sheet of sweat falls off her back in a disgusting cascade of fluid.
It's hot, the air is stale, and you simply cannot sleep because your sleeping schedule sucks. The internal monologue wags. You sleep when you should be up, and when you want to sleep you can’t. You really are hopeless.
A part of her laments this quirk of hers, developed over adolescence during a critically missed part of her upbringing by preoccupied parents. How she would, very quietly, disregard sleep to feed that teenage fire of angst and maturation with books of gentle romance from the royal library, and later on (once Beatrice returned to the Palace after her own incidents at boarding school) more cheap and thrilling articles of smut.
Sophia was quite hopeless in the grand scheme of things.
And now especially as her body called for usage of the bathroom.
