We are Striad, a higher order of men and women. Our job is to look over the Burat, a third-world civilization that lives at the foot of our castle. They mine, farm and provide for us, yet we take them for granted. None of the Striad thinks this is wrong. You may be wondering how that could be. After all, we are mooching off of the hard work the Buratic people labor through every day without so much as a thank-you basket in return. We don’t even send any compensation money to those who lose men or the occasional woman in our service, as if a life could be measured in money. To my people, sending the Buratic people a little card from the King with his condolences for their loss is good enough compensation.

To be honest, I used to think like this, until I donned armor and was assigned as a guard around the borders of the Buratic civilization. My fellow Striad warriors saw me as the weak link in their chain of armor, but they couldn’t deny that my techniques were infallibly efficient. So, here I am, sweating my tush off. I can almost feel my flesh cooking in this darn tin suit. I understand that it’s supposed to protect me from the Burat, but what’s there to protect me from? The dreams here have been crushed. Even the children don’t play.

That disturbed me the most. Every child I’ve seen since taking my post three years ago shuffles to and fro aimlessly until a patrolling Striad comes along to whip them away. The brutality of it all sickens me. It’s not as if I could do anything about it. Seriously, trying to do something about it would be marching right up to the King and demanding we bring the Buratic people into the first-world. Could you imagine? I’d be the laughing stock of all of Skelur! No, thank you very much.

Still, I can stare through the slits of my helm and silently grovel. Not as if there’s anything else to do. We have the Burats so smushed under our thumbs that all thoughts have been squashed from their bones. No one smiles. Occasionally, I hear crying, and screaming, but that seems to be the only sounds aside from the grunts of the laborers not far to my left.

The sounds of deep thudding make me turn my head just slightly. A Burat was being beaten. What a surprise. I turn my head again to stare forward, as I was taught, but something catches my eye. It’s shiny and unusual. The Burats don’t own anything shiny. Everything about their civilization is dull and lifeless, never sparkling and new like the castle of Stri.

I squint, and am about to reach for my helmet to take it off my head, when I’m knocked sideways. I hear the air splitting above me in a piercing whistle, exactly where my eyes had been before I fell. Done up in all this armor, I couldn’t move properly. My helmet had become crooked, smushing my noise painfully into the metal. It’s bleeding, I know. Ever since I was a child, I’d been prone to nose bleeds. My supervisor told me it helps frighten the Burat when my nose randomly starts bleeding while I stand post. It makes them think I’m possessed or something, which is ridiculous. I’m just like them, I’m just a Striad and not a Burat.

“Not her!” someone yells above me. It sounds suspiciously like my friend, a Burat commoner, but I can’t tell through the ringing in my ears.

My armor is really heavy, but the reason I’m having difficulty standing isn’t because of that. I only know that because the person who knocked me sideways is shifted off of me. My burning hip, bruised no doubt, is thankful. With a mouthful of blood, I can’t thank them for saving my life. Assuming that’s what they just did, anyway.

This person tears my helmet off my head and tosses it somewhere. Little dots dance in my eyes, but a quick shake of my head has my vision returning. I see now that the person standing above me is a Burat man, covered in dirt, with coarse hair that’s been tied at the nape of his neck. Just as I suspected, it’s Kavan, the young man with no family left that I’d brought fruit to once a week ever since taking my post. What’s he doing? What’s going on?

“Get out of that armor,” he says to me. I can’t react to him right away, instead sitting up, feeling like a sack of rocks, and take a look at what’s going on around me. In the tree I was standing in front of is an arrow, likely the one that had been meant to kill me. Who was trying to kill Striad warriors? Assuming that’s what they were trying to do anyway. I had to go to Castle Stri at once. It only takes a quick glance behind Kavan to see that Striad warriors are falling at the hands of Burat everywhere, overwhelmed by their numbers. For each of ours that go down, three Burat go with him, but there are far more Burats in this community than us. Our people belong to the pristine city at the top of the mountain, not this barbaric civilization so far down here; no wonder there are very few Striad’s here.

Kavan grabs me by the hair, surprising me. I’ll feel bad about flipping him over my head later. I have to get to the castle. If I don’t, the Burat will try to storm it. If they try to storm it, Stri Elites will slaughter the entire race and destroy the village, leaving us without means of survival. Not a single Striad had picked up a hoe and plowed since the Dark Ages, and they had passed nearly a millennia ago. We would die just the same as the Burats if I don’t warn the King. They have to be contained. Their wild, barbaric manner might be the death of us all.

Still in my horribly clunky armor – seriously, why do they make us wear this stuff? – I begin to crawl away from a groaning Kavan trying to regain breath, and struggle to my feet. I’m not getting far, considering I want to get away without someone else firing an arrow at me. My head is completely unprotected. Why would Kavan bother taking my helmet? Did he want to kill me himself? Why? What was going on? I can’t even process any information other than ‘Get to the King’.

Stop. Stop stop stop. I can’t think about anything right now. I can’t answer my own questions. My main priority is to get to the castle or kill some Burat. I would never do the latter, so I’m forced to make myself crawl agonizingly slow towards the castle, in hopes of not being spotted, trying to ignore the sounds my dying brethren.

I manage crawl maybe three feet when my ankle is grabbed. If I still had my spear, it would have been as easy as eating pie to shove it through Kavan’s head. He was stopping me from getting to my destination. Despite the fondness I had for the handsome worker, his people were betraying the King, betraying the warriors, betraying the laws set forth, each punishable by death. It was only merciful that I do this for him, killing him now, instead of having him be tortured later.

Of course, it’s no surprise this is happening, that the Burat have finally risen against us. We thought we conquered them, but we were wrong. This entire time, they were actually pretending to be beaten, waiting for us to relax our guard, waiting for that perfect moment to strike. It’s then I remember the King isn’t even at the castle, but out in the woods hunting, with his queen and their other children, as well as the best guards. If enough of them storm the woods, the King could be killed. Society would crumble. Our lives will shatter.

I can’t let that happen. I aim a kick for Kavan’s face and miss wildly, simply allowing him to lie flat on both of my legs and keep me from crawling away. “Stop it, Alaina! Stop! I’m trying to help you!” The string of curses that follow I’m not allowed to say, but they make me blush a horribly ugly shade of pink my fellow warriors often tease me about. I struggle, and struggle, and struggle, but for all the attempt at trying to throw him off my back, Kavan just pins me down and grabs my hair again.

It’s not difficult to separate Burat from Striad. Burat’s are tanned, muscular and thin, with coarse black hair and eyes of varying shades of brown. Every Striad is born with honey in their hair and the ocean in their eyes. I myself have hair like gold, lustrous and silky, and blue eyes that seem to change depending on how I’m feeling at the time. Or so I’m told. If anyone could see us squabbling right now, I have no doubt they would put an arrow through my pretty pale face in a heartbeat. Especially if this was a real uprising and I wasn’t just imagining things. Maybe I was actually dead. I don’t know anymore.

“You stop!” I shout back at him. “Make them all stop!”

“I can’t!” Kavan forces my head back so I can see his wild brown eyes. “Alaina, take off your armor!”

Without my consent, he begins to rip it off of me anyway, first my shoulder plates and then my chest piece, until I’m down to nothing but a light silken top and wool breeches, and my leather boots. I try not to struggle too much, or feel too violated. For some reason, I get the feeling that Kavan is trying to help me, even though he’s probably just trying to set me up for an easy kill. Still… if he wanted to kill me, he only needed to grab my sweet sear and jam it through my back.

My spear! I can see her, slender and carved to perfection, decorated with a banner representing the arms of my house. I scrabble for her in the dirt, not quite discretely, so Kavan sees what I’m doing and kicks my pretty spear away from me. “Stop that!” It seems all we want each other to do is stop. I highly doubt anything can stop now. Something has been pushed into motion and no one can stop it, no one can go back. It’s as if the Burat are repaying all of those life debts we owe them. A life for a life. It’s not the greatest philosophy to live by, but I can accept it as a reasonable reason. We’ve taken too much, and now we’re going to get that back tenfold.

Just as long as it took Kavan and I to finally stop squabbling in the dirt – since I wasn’t going without a fight – the fight around us had ended. I half expected someone to haul Kavan off of me and kill him, but at the same time, I knew what had happened. My people, my fellow brothers and sisters of the Warrior, had been subdued. I was the last Striad still fighting in Burat, and that wasn’t a good thing. I submitted when I came to this conclusion. What was the use of fighting? Clearly, I wasn’t going to get where I needed to go.

“Kavan. Kill her.”

Kavan stood, hauled me to my feet, and I could see the man who spoke. I recognized him as the chief worker, the man in charge of keeping the workers on task. He was probably three times my size. His hate glares had me pinned to the spot. What had I ever done to him? Nothing, if I remember correctly. I’ve only laid eyes on Maco a handful of times, and in fact, I never even raised a hand to any Burat. Maybe that didn’t matter to him. Actually, it clearly didn’t matter to him. I was one of the Striad, and I had to be killed. What else could I do but accept my fate?

Kavan stood his ground, and opened his mouth to defend me, but a young boy no older than twelve burst through the tree line crying, “Maco!”, causing the chief worker to turn his one eyed glare onto him. The boy was grinning ear to ear. Whatever he had to say was obviously pleasing to him.

“What is it?” Maco asked gruffly, eyeing the scrawny boy. He was clearly a Burat, gaunt and skinny but strong. All of the Striad children were plump and a healthy shade of pale white, a far cry from the ashy tan this boy was.

He glanced at me just briefly and seemed to do a double take. Whatever exciting thing he had to say died a little and fear lit up in his stormy gray eyes. What an unusual color for a Burat to have. Normally their eyes didn’t stray away from the color brown, though I can’t deny it hasn’t happened before. Usually that’s from inter-breeding between the Buratic and the Striads, which was forbidden and punishable by death. “Uhm,” the dirty boy muttered, licking his lips nervously before continuing, “the… the King. He’s dead. The Queen and her children too. Or… all but one of them.” He gave me another fearful look.

What? No! No! The King can’t be dead! It was impossible, it couldn’t be. Sure the King had fallen on the fat side lately, but he was a fierce warrior, and no less nubile with a sword, bow or spear than he had been twenty years ago! The King, the Queen, their children… my family, gone. Gone…

That would leave me as the only heir to the Striad throne. Did they do this on purpose? Did Kavan save me specifically because he knew the King and his family would die out in those woods, leaving me as the key to the throne? I wouldn’t be used. I wouldn’t let the name of my family line go spoiled by some stupid Burats.

“You’ll die for this,” I hiss, and suddenly I’m free of Kavan’s grip. This time, I won’t feel bad for hurting him. He deserved it. They all deserved it. They needed to die. How could they kill such innocents? Young children, ten and eight, leaving me all alone… alone forever… How could this have happened? Everything changed so quickly and I can hardly… I can’t even…


Maco reaches for me, stepping over Kavan, but I’m a trained warrior of the Striad. I easily dance away from his grasp, snatch my spear from the ground, and thanks to Kavan stripping me of my armor, I can leap away with grace. Speed is in my blood. Anger is coursing through my veins. Disbelief is clogging my mind. Pain is stabbing my heart. Regret is taking over my life. All the things I could have done, the things I should have said…

Into the very woods my family was killed I leap, and disappear into the foliage with calls for my capture at my back. Good luck. I won’t go down without a fight.