Chapter 2: Refugees of War
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-28, Month XII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 28th day of the 12th Month
---
Torn
Arwen by the 12th Month, was now only filled with constant fighting even in this cold winter. Every street in the major cities and towns was painted red and the stench of death was everywhere. Not just from the fighting either. Settlements that had been caught in the crossfire between the crown forces and the rebel armies had been burned, looted, or simply abandoned once there was nobody left inside them who could defend them. The war had moved quickly once the generals committed to it. Faster than anyone who had only thought about it as a possibility had expected.
Those who fled from the fighting looked worse than the beggars they mocked on the streets. Most only had torn clothes and a few belongings they could carry. Mothers carried their children very closely and fathers who had not yet been discovered by the army or didn't want to have anything to do with the rebellion kept their heads down, doing everything they could to avoid being drafted into a militia to fight off the rebels or the reverse. They didn't want to be caught by the crown's officers because that meant being handed a weapon and using that to ultimately kill their own friends and family who fought for the rebellion whether they wanted any part of it or not. To be caught by the rebel commanders in some areas was no different. Both sides needed bodies and the bodies available were the ones still standing on the streets.
The people who chose to run chose it fully aware of what they were walking into. A road in winter with no guaranteed destination was not a better option either. It was just a different kind of bad than the one they were already in.
Now they worried more about the bandits and beasts that may still be out and about even in this harsh weather. On top of all that they had no clear destination. They only knew they had to go north. Because south was where it all started and east and west were no better.
This first group of refugees numbered in the hundreds. They had managed to cross Arwen's northern border which was pretty much empty of any border guards by the time they reached it. Now they marched into the cold. It was probably a death sentence but they figured it was better to do so than stay in a kingdom their home they could no longer recognize. They took no account of which kingdom they would cross or what political affiliations their kingdom had with the others. They just walked towards a direction that is furthest away from the fighting.
Now they marched along the long stretch of Imperial Highway covered in snow. Though it would have been easy to get lost in direction, they always remembered the legends of the Great Forest so they never stepped foot near its tree line even with the snow covering it. The ominous feeling and the ingrained stories had made them able to avoid it entirely.
Many dropped from exhaustion, hypothermia, hunger, illness, and wounds from the fighting after a few days. Some had barely escaped burning settlements before they joined the marching crowd north.
One of the families currently on the road was a family of three, with one still on the way. A father, a mother, and a daughter whose age was around two. They were the family of Rabia.
They were originally from a settlement called Doroki, some fifty kilometers from the eastern border. It was an inland settlement with only rivers and streams as their source of fresh water. It was a quiet place, but even there the rebellion had reached their doors. The father had worked as a river trader and the mother had worked in the textile collective. Nothing extraordinary about any of it. It was the kind of life that was easy to take for granted until it was gone.
Now they walked with strangers who were in a similar state. They had been closer to the northern border which is the primary reason they could arrive at the crossing as quickly as they did. They found thousands of people gathered there on the first day, all of them seemingly heading further north. But where exactly? And in this weather? They were already at great risk but they had chosen this path and there was no going back now.
They now numbered less and less with each passing day. A few hundred from that original thousands would fall and die every day, covered in snow or taken by beasts that still lurked even in the cold. The highway was wide enough that you could pass the spot where someone had fallen and not know exactly what had happened there unless you looked closely. Most people stopped looking closely at the dead after the first few days. It didn't help anything in their situation and it cost you something every time you did it, your sanity.
By now the hundreds had been cut down to a few pockets of people numbering less than a hundred and fifty. They formed three groups of fifty. The goal was no longer just arriving at a destination. It was to actually survive getting there. One of the reasons why they split into groups of fifty was not for some higher purpose. It was a tactic to get away from the beasts. Whether a beast went after one group or not didn't really matter at that point. They needed to survive no matter the cost.
This wasn't selfishness. They all took the same risks. If one group got caught then the others could survive. And with them they carried the memories of those who died, people they had only known for a brief period after joining the same road.
By the eighteenth day they were now less than a hundred. They had met every unfortunate thing the road could offer. Hunger, exhaustion, wounds, beasts and weather which is bad enough to make all the other things worse. Thankfully there were no more bandits around this time of year. The weather was too harsh for anyone with a choice to be outside. Even the beasts were less frequent than they would have been in warmer seasons, but less frequent didn't mean they were gone to hibernate. The ones that did appear were the kind that stayed active year-round because the cold meant nothing to them. Those encounters cost people their lives.
How did they manage to last this long in the cold? They marched during the hours when the weather wasn't at its worst and sheltered when blizzards came through. They dug into the snow when they had nothing better to shelter in. Some of them knew how. Most learned quickly because the alternative was not learning quickly and only death will follow. Along the way they had picked up furs and coats from the deceased who had worn them and they wore them in layers of two or three. It wasn't comfortable. Nothing about any of this was comfortable. But it kept them alive when nothing else would have.
Their main concern had shifted from the cold to the dwindling food supply. People who had started the journey carrying several days of food had long since run through it. What remained was being rationed down to the minimum needed to keep walking. The forest running alongside the road had food in it, everyone knew that, but nobody went in to find it. The legends ran too deep, fear is what kept them from foraging. Whatever lived in that forest was not something you went looking for just because you were hungry.
But with fewer mouths to feed each day they had a little more room to spare. That particular calculation sat with all of them in a way nobody talked about out loud.
Still, time wasn't on their side. There was illness and their old wounds from earlier encounters with beasts that never fully healed on the road. A wound that would have been treated and recovered from in a proper settlement festered out here. An illness that started as a cough became something worse within a few days of cold air, bad sleep and not enough food.
Everyone was already at their wits' end.
By the twenty-sixth day the family of Rabia was falling apart from the inside. They were blaming each other now, which was just as cruel as everything else that had happened to them. The infighting tore at what was left of them. Why had they even come out here to suffer more than they would have if they stayed? It may or may not have been a worse fate to remain in Arwen. But there was no way to know for certain. That uncertainty made the arguing worse because neither of them could win it and both of them knew it.
The husband had started to think more and more about what his parents had told him before they left. They had urged him to flee early, before the rebellion spread to Doroki, before the army began sweeping through the settlements for conscripts. He had waited and missed that small window of opportunity. He had thought they had more time. He had been wrong and the current situation had made that wrongness feel very much worse.
On that same day the mother went into early labor.
Fortunately there was someone in the remaining group whose profession was exactly that, helping women give birth. They managed to save the mother's life. But the infant did not survive. The road had been too much for a newborn to handle. After the delivery the mother's postpartum began to set in and the grief and the cold and the exhaustion had all hit her at once. She became distant, sometimes unreachable. The husband had to drag her the rest of the way on a makeshift wooden pallet. He moved in silence, full of tears that he didn't let out and regret he couldn't put down for not listening to his parents when they urged them to leave the kingdom earlier.
Their daughter, the two-year-old who had walked when she could and been carried when she couldn't, died on the twenty-eighth day. Her small body simply couldn't hold on anymore. She became another casualty, not directly from the rebellion but from everything the rebellion had set in motion.
Many had died on this road and many more surely will follow. Most not from the fighting itself but from what they are experiencing right now. Quietly, from what the road took from them one but at a time.
The father kept his child's death to himself. His wife was asleep on the pallet. So he dragged her and kept walking to a destination even though they didn't know where.
By the time she woke and looked around, they were already at the crossroads to the road leading to Maya Village. When they reached there, only twenty or so people had managed to survive from everything that had started as hundreds at the border. The cost of getting there was something none of them had fully processed yet and likely wouldn't for some time.
But as fate had it, their luck had not completely given up on them.
The village had anticipated this.
While the Elder Council was still debating whether to formally accept refugees, the practical work had already started. A camp had been set up outside the forest in a buffer zone between the Great Forest boundary and the Kingdom of Ogind's nearest territorial markers. It was considered as a no man's land. No laws, no kingdom affiliation, no diplomatic complications. The village had taken that as reason enough to set up there. It was about one kilometer from the road and a little further from the forest entrance itself, sitting in that quiet stretch of open ground that belonged to nobody on paper.
The camp itself wasn't huge in any sense. It had been built with haste once the refugee situation became clear in Month XI, and it wasn't even finished until the twentieth day of Month XII. It was built mainly underground to insulate from the cold, with a few air holes for circulation. The construction was similar to the forward operating base August and members of Talon One and Two had built in the Southern Beastman Tribes territory during an earlier operation. They knew what worked and they built it according to those standards.
They have underground bunk beds with a comfortable maximum of fifty people, though comfortable in this case just meant they were out of the wind and off the frozen ground, there were also two hearths dotted on the center part to start a fire and warm the people within it. Above ground were three structures used as garrison posts and lookout points for the shifts on watch. The rotation was short because standing outside in this weather for too long was its own problem.
There were only around ten patrol unit members stationed here under Sergeant Sharmayn. All of them were capable of giving first aid. The main forest entrance was about five hundred meters away so they could also direct refugees there if needed. It was a small operation but it was what could be put together hastily in time. For now it was enough.
The lookout on shift was the one who spotted them first. Hazy figures moving through the falling snow and harsh winds. The alert went up.
Sharmayn came out and assessed the situation.
"Chris and Piim, go check it out. Red flag if hostile, blue flag if refugees. The rest stay ready. Flares ready just in case."
"Copy that, leader."
Chris and Piim crossed to the group and saw their state immediately. Malnourished, cold, exhausted. Not the look of people planning anything that may cause harm. It was the look of people who had been broken down by their situation and were still moving out of habit more than hope. One of them, the man dragging the pallet, looked like he hadn't slept properly in days. Maybe longer than that.
They signaled the blue flag.
The camp moved quickly. The underground quarters were prepared and the arrivals were brought in out of the cold. Most of them didn't fully understand what was happening yet. They were too tired for that. They only knew they were no longer standing in the snow.
Twenty-five souls in total made it to the camp that day, a few more having joined the original group at the crossroads in the final stretch of road.
The camp personnel got to work. Food was brought out in careful portions. Blankets were distributed. The medic on shift went person to person doing a basic assessment, noting the ones who needed immediate attention and the ones who just needed warmth and food and to stop moving for a while. Most of them fell into the second category. A few did not.
The family of Rabia were among the ones brought in and given a bunk. The mother was placed carefully, still on the pallet. The father sat beside her without speaking. He had not let go of his daughter's body until one of the camp personnel gently handled it. He let them finally take her away from him. For he had nothing left to argue about.
Sergeant Sharmayn sent her report to the village by a runner before the end of the day.
First refugees confirmed. Twenty-five survivors. All alive. Medical assessment underway. Awaiting further instructions.
She didn't add anything else to it. That was the format.
The camp personnel wondered quietly how many more would come after this. Hopefully not too many. But, it would probably be more than what they received now. The war in Arwen was not going to end quickly and the road north was the only road most of these people had.
For now the camp had done what it was built to do. The rest of the decisions belonged to the village.